While you did just have dinner, your stomach informs you that it has room to spare for a cup of tea and some of those little ricecake/cracker-things that Souken is nibbling away at. As such, you accept the offered hospitality, and the maid takes over pouring the tea from Kanae, using the spare cup that was set out in anticipation of this purpose.

Once she's finished, she sets the teapot down, bows her head to her employers, and quietly excuses herself.

Given the concern Souken raised about hiding the auras of your spells, you feel it only natural to inquire if there's anything that needs to be done to hide the increased density of Quincy auras that will be in and around Karakura in the near future. Urahara did mention that his shop does business with Shinigami patrols, which tells you that there are, or should be, little death gods passing through on a fairly regular basis.

"We'll need to make sure that everyone keeps their heads down," Souken replies easily. "The average Shinigami isn't particularly adept at reading spiritual signatures - it's part of the reason why they have so much trouble tracking Earthbound spirits - and a Quincy who isn't actively using his powers looks and feels much like an ordinary human to most methods of detection the Soul Society has available."

Your own experience bears out the bit about Quincy looking like ordinary humans, at least. The first time you met the Kurosakis, Masaki and the twins seemed a little unusual, spiritually speaking, but not in any way that you'd have looked twice at or even noticed if they'd been mixed in with a crowd of other humans. From Ichigo, you saw only the overflowing potential and the bindings all but smothering him.

Of course, these days you can pretty much pick out a Quincy aura on sight, but this is after you'd met and spoken to a dozen of them in close proximity and run a number of detailed scans on one Quincy soul in particular, to say nothing of all the members of the Wandenreich you spied on remotely.

Considering how rare Quincy are on Earth these days, the odds of a typical Shinigami-on-the-street being as familiar with the spirit archers as you are seem like they'd be small, at best. Indeed, it's entirely possible and even likely that the average soul reaper has no idea what a Quincy aura looks like, a thought that Souken confirms he shares.

"Lieutenants and captains would be another matter, of course," the Ishida elder continues, sipping at his tea. "Perhaps some of the higher-ranked seats as well. But if one of them shows up in town, when they SHOULD be busy preparing to face down Silbern... well, then we'll have bigger problems."

That's certainly true.

Putting the matter of stealth aside, you return to the topic of the extradimensional Mansions. At six occupants per casting, you can manage with five of the expanded spaces, while erring on the side of giving everyone plenty of space. Your previous experience setting up for your party on Bali Ha'i has already given you the adjustments necessary to provide food and drink for those staying in each Mansion over the length of their stay, rather than the massive one-time feast the spell normally provides, in addition to the standard duration-extending formulas necessary to create the Mansions today and have them last until the big day is resolved, one way or another.

But as with the time you conjured up a row of residential spaces along a Pacific beach, there's enough mana left over that you can afford to enhance an aspect of your creations.

You turn the possibilities over in your head for a few moments.

The idea of improving the food comes to mind, giving you a good laugh. The standard Mansion already provides a nine-course banquet for dozens of people, with food at a level of quality that's better than anything you could otherwise conjure short of a full-blown Heroes' Feast - and there isn't enough excess mana in the Mansion's spell matrix to pull off that kind of an upgrade.

Where better food wasn't really possible, increased space just seems unnecessary, and even a little counter-productive. You WERE hoping to stretch your magical muscles with this bit of Conjuration, and casting fewer spells wouldn't help with that goal.

As for the prospect of touching up the servants, you'll admit that the idea of leaving a group of Quincy to be waited on by a bunch of "ghostly" man- and maidservants might be tempting Fate, but you also can't help but think that leaving those same Quincy to deal with a bunch of seemingly human(oid) yet utterly soulless bodies wouldn't go over any better. Considering that you, their creator, had to resort to magical analysis to make sure your Gerudo wait staff were really just magical constructs and not something more nefarious... well, at least the standard servants are OBVIOUSLY mere projections.

In the end, you decide to go with improved decor. The furnishings and little artistic additions for the standard Mansions are generally quite nice, as befits the name of the spell, but they could be better.

As for the precise architectural style you'll be using, you decide to leave that up to Souken and Kanae, as it's their house that you're going to be making temporary additions to, and their relatives who will be taking up occupancy.

"As it happens," Souken begins, "Masaki passed on quite the description of one particular 'mansion' - one that you made for a family by the name of Shuzen?"

You blink at that, as two rather different trains of thought pass through your mind in response.

The first is idle curiosity about whether Masaki just glimpsed the Shuzens' lodgings while walking up and down the "residental" part of the beach, or if she was actually invited into their quarters at some point - for tea, maybe? The Kurosaki matriarch has gotten along well enough with Gyokuro and Akasha the few times you've seen them all together that it isn't a particular stretch of the imagination to picture them chatting over drinks and a light meal, much as you and the Ishidas are doing right now.

As for the other thought-

"Why would you want to put some of your relatives up in Dracula's castle?" Briar asks.

-yeah, that.

Kanae frowns suspiciously at her father-in-law.

"...just a passing thought," Souken replies evasively.

Kanae's suspicions do not appear to lessen. "I believe making the extra rooms match the rest of the house will be fine, Alex," she says firmly, while not taking her gaze off her father-in-law for a moment.

The lady of the house has spoken.

A short time later - after everyone has finished their tea and had enough ricecakes for their taste - you find yourself directed to a hall on the second floor of the house. There are two rooms on each side of the corridor, three set up as bedrooms and the fourth as an office, with a bathroom at the end of the hall. Although none of the rooms look dusty, they all have a certain feeling of emptiness to them, as if they haven't been in use for some time.

You cast the Spell of the Private Sanctum, plunging the entire hallway into misty shadow, and then cast the Spell of the Magnificent Mansion, with your attendant modifications. The "door" appears along the right-hand wall, between the bathroom and the first bedroom, and while Souken and Kanae investigate the interior, you set about masking the spell's aura. Anchoring magic meant to conceal solid objects to a space-within-space is tricky, but you aligned the portal with the wall for a reason - namely, to try and make the spell consider the extra-dimensional entryway as part of the wall, and hence a valid target, or failing that, to get their auras to overlap so that masking the one will at least blur the other.

While Illusion Magic is not your greatest forte, your overall level of magical ability is sufficient to get the Spell to Mask Dweomers to take hold on the not-exactly-enchantment wall of the Ishida residence. Even so, you frown, knowing that this particular spell is fairly weak as far as anti-detection measures go, and may not suffice to hide an effectively ninth-tier spell.

Are you satisfied with giving the Ishidas this level of sensory concealment?

Although you trust your own spellwork, you find the idea of leaving evidence of your craft unwarded against analysis beyond a modest Spell to Mask Dweomers to be less than satisfactory.

The notion of setting up a long-term version of the Private Sanctum occurs to you, but after reviewing the formula several times, you can't see a way to decouple the spell's visual manifestation or interference from the rest of its effects - at least not without running an extensive analysis of the Sanctum's spell matrix and then designing a new spell based on that, which is something you simply don't have time for.

You'd rather not create a traffic hazard in the Ishida home, particularly not one that would involve people appearing out of seemingly empty space as they exit the Sanctum's boundaries. As with the question of improved servants in the Mansion, that just seems like inviting trouble.

The idea of using a Spell of Illusion to "overwrite" the Sanctum's visual properties comes to mind, but this hallway is going to be playing host to a fairly large number of Quincy in the not-too-distant future, and your existing suite of Illusion Magic offers nothing that could reliably account for their movements.

Fortunately, the Spell of the Private Sanctum is shapeable, so you can simply re-cast it so that it covers the walls where your series of portals will be located, while leaving the hall itself clear. Granted, you can only reduce the dimensions of the "fog" so far, so this will plunge the three guest rooms and that spare office into an outwardly impenetrable murk, but that seems an acceptable compromise, since none of these rooms currently are or will be receiving the sort of traffic the hallway does.

Well, none except for the bathroom.

You make a mental note not to obscure that end of the hall when you're laying down these mini-Sanctums.

Adding a Greater Magic Aura to give these rooms the appearance of being non-magical seems like a good way to top off your temporary security measures, although there are a couple of technical hurdles you'll have to overcome. The first of those is convincing your magic to treat a single room as an object unto itself, rather than simply part of a much larger object (the house); the other is whether or not you can push the spell into affecting such massive targets.

You think it's doable, but you'll need to check with Souken and Kanae and make sure they're okay with the modifications to your plan before you go ahead and make them.

On that note, you glance into the open Mansion and call out, "So what do you think?"

"I think I could easily get a headache trying to understand how all of this fits inside the house," Kanae replies, looking around at the decor. As per your decision on how to spend the leftover mana, while the interior of the Mansion is patterned after the Ishida residence, the contents are a few steps up from the tastefully upper middle-class/lower upper-class aesthetic of the actual house.

Among other things, the Ishidas don't have a fountain standing in their front hall - or anywhere else in the house, you would expect. Maybe the backyard.

Incidentally, said fountain features a ring of archers - clad in the monk-like Quincy attire you've seen Souken and Uryuu wearing, as opposed to the more militant uniforms of the Wandenreich - standing with their bows drawn back and aimed high, crystal-clear streamers of water spraying from the tips of the arrows.

Studying the statuary, Souken admits, "I think I'm regretting not pushing for the castle."

Kanae sighs, but rather than chide her father-in-law, she instead asks about the servants standing nearby. "Why do they look like ghosts?"

"That's just how the spell was designed," you reply with a shrug. "I figured it would be less shocking to leave them this way than to give them solid bodies that seemed human, but still didn't have souls."

Mrs. Ishida considers that. "You may be right."

All in all, the two Ishidas are rather pleased by the accommodations you've provided. Kanae is a little concerned about the availability of food, drink, laundry, and bathrooms, but you reassure her that the Mansion provides plenty of the first two by design, and your experiences on Bali Ha'i led you to include the latter two.

"Just try not to think too hard about where everything goes," Briar advises cheerfully.

Naturally, once she's said that, you find it hard NOT to think about. Which was likely the point.

To try and distract everyone from Briar's little prank, you lay out the wards you had in mind. Souken and Kanae are a little bemused by the idea of the spare rooms in this part of the house becoming impossible to view from the outside, but don't have any real objection to the idea.

"If we do end up putting people in those rooms, they'll probably appreciate the privacy," Souken says.

There is that.

With that matter settled, you get on with your remaining spellwork.

Oh, why not? Worse comes to worst, you can just dismiss the odd Mansion out and re-cast the spell.

With that decided, you gather your power, focus on the image of the Mansions you want, and prepare for a bit of intensive spellcasting.

One after another and at six-second intervals, portals begin to line the hallway between the existing doors, leapfrogging across the corridor each time, and moving further down at every other casting. Somewhere in the middle of this, an idle thought occurs to you: namely, that if you had cast Magnificent Mansion in ritual format and gone for extra power, you probably could have created all four Mansions in one go.

Granted, that wouldn't have given you the sort of magical workout that casting four ninth-tier spells in quick succession does, but it's something to keep in mind all the same.

With what is hopefully the last of the Mansions in place, you take a moment to catch your breath, mystically speaking.

"Why does that last doorway look different?" Souken wonders, squinting at the farthest portal.

Kanae blinks, looks, and then sighs. "Alex, you didn't."

"I think he did," Briar giggles.

The words are spoken in that particular cadence that you've only ever heard from a mother dealing with a misbehaving child.

Souken, meanwhile, makes a sound of particular interest and hurries over to the door.

And then he laughs in delight. "Kanae! Come see this. Dracula's castle, indeed..."

Mrs. Ishida spares you one more look of maternal disappointment, then sighs again. "Coming, Father-in-law."

Once Kanae has moved off a bit, Briar hovers closer to your ear. "She may not like it, but I think it's funny."

Having your partner's approval makes everything better.

"Serious question, though," the fairy adds. "Are you going to leave it like that, or change it to match the rest?"

"Going to wait and see how seriously Mrs. Ishida objects before making that call," you admit.

"Ah."

Seeing as how Souken will need a few minutes to explore the depths of the false castle chambers, you go ahead and get started on applying your desired stealth measures. You cast Mask Dweomer on the first three extra-dimensional entryways, taking a moment to confirm that the spell "sticks" in spite of the slightly unorthodox arrangement, and then consider how best to layer another Private Sanctum over top of those.

The architecture of the Ishida home and the minimum space requirements of the spell don't exactly play nice together: you can't simply wrap the Sanctum around the hall in a U-bend formation, as that would plunge one end of the hall (or the bathroom that sits at the other) into cloudy concealment; and neither can you shape the spell into a broad arch, as there isn't enough of a "third floor" or attic above this part of the house to prevent the impenetrable grey fogbank from "leaking" through the roof and becoming visible to outside observers.

True, you'd only need a few seconds to cast a Spell of Illusion to hide the visual effect, but that's a few seconds of genuine risk. Plus you wouldn't be able to hide the aura of the spells; a Magic Aura has to be attached to something solid, be it inert object or mobile creature, and it doesn't extend beyond its target.

Maybe if you oriented the magic the other way around, made it a trough instead of an arch... but no, that would just end up obscuring the rooms directly below this hall.

Looks like casting two separate, smaller Sanctums is the only way to go, so you go ahead and get started on one of those, covering the side of the corridor that definitely won't require any further adjustments.

You're about halfway through that ritual when Souken emerges from the castle-style mansion, chuckling to himself. Kanae is right behind him, and her expression is...

Out of curiosity, what kind of "special features" did you include in this Mansion?

To be honest, Mrs. Ishida looks exasperated.

You think on the changes you made to the castle-style Mansion, trying to figure out what particular trait, or combination thereof, went too far.

It probably wasn't the torches and candles. Even with the eerie blue-white flames that your modifications called for, they're not that unusual. Likewise, you think you can rule out the various suits of armor as the offending feature; no matter how fearsome their designs or how realistic their weaponry, the Mansion doesn't have the power to bring them to a semblance of life, so they're nothing more than thematic decoration. As for the other bits you added...

"If it's the pipe organ that's bothering you, Mrs. Ishida," you say, as the low, moaning notes of the instrument in question echo ominously from the mouth of the portal, "the servant playing it has instructions only to do so when requested, and then only during daylight hours and early evening."

"I'm glad to hear that, Alex," Kanae replies evenly, "but that wasn't the thing that really bothered me."

Ah.

"It's the servants, then."

"Yes." She doesn't quite raise her voice or ask 'What were you THINKING?' but you can tell that she kind of wants to. "Did you have to make them seem so realistic?"

You glance past the Ishidas and into the Mansion. Perhaps sensing the will of its creator, one of the conjured servants steps forward - or more like floats forward, seeing as how his legs end somewhere past the knee, with everything below that being a formless mist that quickly disperses into empty air. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the oversized napkin the servant carries folded over one forearm, the ends of which diffuse into their own misty trails.

"I mean, it was either this or skeleton waiters," you argue in defense of your stylistic choice.

"Skeletons," Kanae repeats after a moment.

"Stalservants?" Briar wonders, mostly to herself. "Stalservos?"

You nod, and briefly summon up an illusion of a skeleton with the same classy servant's wear as the pseudo-ghost waiting patiently behind Kanae, its fleshless bones polished white and spots of blue-white spirit fire blazing brightly in otherwise empty eyesockets.

You let the image lapse with a shrug. "I just figured that since the servants looked a bit like ghosts to start with, I might as well roll with that."

"But no chains?" Souken asks.

"That seemed like it really would have been pushing too far," you admit.

Souken nods. "True enough. Well, I think this will be just fine as-is."

Kanae sighs. "Really, Father-in-law?"

"Of course!" Souken replies brightly. A moment later, he frowns in the direction of the pipe organ, and then turns to you. "Although... does it only play that particular song?"

"It's borrowing from my musical talents, which are... a bit limited," you admit, without going into detail about how the blessings of the Goddesses shore up your competency - or lack thereof - with various instruments. "However-"

A twist of will, a "tap" on the matrix of the spell to convey your intent, and the organist launches into something a little more upbeat.

Gained Pipe Organ F

"-if someone hums a few bars, it can improvise."

Souken chuckles at that. "That will do."

Kanae looks like she wants to object, but she ends up bowing to the whimsy of her Elder.

For your part, you go ahead and finish up with your warding plans. After the two smaller Private Sanctums are in place over the walls and within the mundane rooms behind them, and a Greater Magic Aura laid over the entire hallway, you dismiss the larger Sanctum that was covering most of this upper wing of the house. Then you go over the entire area with a precisely focused Spell to Dispel Magic, clearing away the residual traces of your extensive spellcasting, leaving the place feeling quite mundane.

You know, as long as one doesn't open up one of the closed doors to the rooms full of thick fog beyond, and also ignores how the size of the rooms makes mockery of the limits of architecture and physics.

Finally, about three-quarters of an hour after you started, you declare your work finished. Kanae invites you to stay for lunch, but you turn her down, saying that you've already eaten, and it's getting very late back home.

On that note, you teleport back to California from the Sanctum-shrouded office, leaving a request for the Ishidas to let the Kurosakis know that you'd left without incident.

It's once again past twilight and approaching the hours of true darkness when your feet carry you back to Sunnydale. In a perverse echo of your encounter with the punks in Karakura, you finally have a proper face-to-fangs encounter with the local breed of vampire. Three of them, to be exact, with an excess of leather, metal bits, and hairgel in their wardrobe, like something from the Eighties.

"Well, well," one of the group says, leering at you. "What do we have-"

"SCORCHING RAY!"

"-OH HELLGODS IT BURNS WHY!"

And then you're running past three piles of ash, twisting in the winds.

Gained Blooded E (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)

"Huh," Briar notes. "Did that feel a little anticlimactic to you?"

Maybe a bit. Very satisfying, though.

"Well, yeah, that too."

Proceed to...

...the Fairy Mining Trip. (June 9th-15th.) (Pending...)

Over the next couple of days after your trip to Karakura, you get on with the "destructive" phase of testing the items you acquired from your victory over the grimstalker. Having recognized that it would be safest to perform these trials outdoors so that you don't accidentally set something on fire - as opposed to intentionally - or expose anyone important to you to toxic fumes and residues, you pick out a location-

-set up a Private Sanctum to keep out unwanted eyes, summon Batreaux, and get to work.

For the sake of simplicity and thoroughness, you started with the Grimstalker's Arrows, doing one last analysis of the poison on the crude arrowheads. It's a simple matter to match the stuff to one of the substances from the Grimstalker's Poison Kit, which wouldn't have done worse than numb flesh if limited to mere contact, but is a pretty strong paralytic if it gets into the bloodstream.

Then you start throwing tiny amounts of various elemental energies at the arrows. Originating from Faerie as it does, the worked wood proves to be tougher than the average Earthly branch, but in the end, it's still just wood. Physical force can sunder it easily at these thicknesses, acid erodes it, enough electricity can start it smoldering, and a bit of fire - especially after the acid has dissolved some of whatever protective finish was used on it - lights it up like a candle.

After running down the list of elemental forces and finding no surprises, you pretty much just let the arrows burn down to streaks of char and blackened arrowheads. Once you're satisfied that the poison has cooked off, a Shatter spell blows the pointy rocks into fragments, along with a few buried stones you didn't notice before casting it.

Lost Grimstalker's Arrows

You dispose of the Grimstalker's Belt in a similar manner, gaining a fraction more insight into the resiliency of Faerie plants along the way.

Lost Grimstalker's Belt

And speaking of the Belt, what do you do with the Poison Kit you collected from it? As far as you can tell, all of this stuff was made by the grimstalker himself, so there's a connection there that someone could use to trace it. At least in theory. In practice, it's a very faint connection: none of the various concoctions are enchanted; the methods used to produce them didn't leave magically significant traces, likely having been done manually; and the Kit as a whole, much less any individual part of it, just doesn't register as significant, hinting that for all the kills the grimstalker made, he was nothing special in the end. At least not as an apothecary.

Besides, poisons are expendable by their very nature. The odds of the grimstalker having done anything impressive with these specific samples of shredded, ground, and/or liquefied material are slim, which greatly reduces the likelihood of anyone tracking you down via your possession of them.

Plus, while you have no plans of becoming an assassin, the Poison Kit could still be of use to you from its material value. The worth of the antidotes is obvious, some of the "poisons" could be used as counter-agents or for medical purposes, and even the purely toxic stuff still comes from Faerie, giving them potential value as reagents. And you DO know a couple of ninjas...

So, to repeat: what did you do with the Grimstalker's Poison Kit?

That leaves the Grimstalker's Armor, Bow, and Sword to dispose of. Being enchanted, these items could be broken down into materials and reagents that you could use elsewhere, whether for sale to Gen or in your own item-crafting efforts. It would be easier to try producing your own battle-silver, for example, if you kept samples of the stuff on hand to serve as templates and fuel for your Conjuration Magic. That said, there's a non-zero chance that holding on to some fraction of your victory trophies would let them be traced to you. Selling them and giving up your claim would help to loosen those connections, especially if they got re-sold again, but testing the items to literal destruction would break those chains entirely.

You suppose it comes down to a question of greed versus paranoia. You checked, and the summer solstice, when the Fae Lord returns to collect some of "his" sungold and discovers the fate of his chosen guardian, falls on June 20th this year. That's just three days after Yhwach is due to wake up; win or lose, it would be a poor time for one of the Fair Folk to come looking for you with a grudge.

When one is looking for a testing ground, it's hard to beat a rocky desert's combination of isolation and sheer lack of potential for collateral damage. Particularly when you and Briar have enough druidic and Fae magic between you to quickly suss out any animals hidden nearby, and convince them to go for a stroll.

Granted, having a self-contained solid fogbank appear in the middle of such hot and dry terrain would be incredibly suspect, but there's no one within mundane viewing distance to see anything, and the Spell of Illusion that you wrap around your Private Sanctum should be plenty to deal with any unexpected passersby or literal far-sighted individuals, by making the area look like the same boring, empty patch of desert that was here a moment earlier.

Retained Grimstalker's Poison Kit

You make a mental note to get some more secure containers for your collection of poisons and antidotes, preferably ones that can be clearly labeled as dangerous, sealed tight, and placed somewhere out of reach of inquisitive little fingers. Out of sight, too, now that you think on it.

You decide that keeping the remains of the grimstalker's gear to fuel future item-crafting efforts is worth the potential risk of being tracked. Physically and mystically disassembling the sword, armor, and bow will be enough to break the traces most easily exploited by Divination Magic; as a rule, one cannot divine the location of a particular item if said item no longer exists as a recognizeable whole. This is one of the reasons why Hyrule traditionally separates relics of a certain level of importance into multiple fragments, the others having to do with honoring the three Goddesses, and that near-religious obsession with turning every damn thing into a puzzle...

Shaking off a building frustration, you bring forth the Grimstalker's Sword. Of the three armaments, the enchantments upon the blade are, if not precisely the weakest, then the most simple and straightforward in nature. Strike accurately, cut more deeply. That's it. You and Batreaux know the spells that mortal magic-users would employ to produce such effects, as well as what man-made equivalents to the Fae-forged sword look like and how they react to attempts to disenchant or destroy their physical vessels; from that, you can easily extrapolate how the magic of the Grimstalker's Sword will react, which makes it the safest to start with.

How the Fae-forged battle-silver will react is still a bit of a mystery - Batreaux doesn't have any experience to speak of with the stuff, and Briar's never seen the material subjected to disenchantment or reforging - but at least you've ruled out one possible vector for explosive results.

Disenchanting magic items is a fairly involved process. It's not as complex or involved as the actual process of creation - destruction is nearly always easier than creation, after all - but it's also not nearly as simple as merely sundering the physical object or casting a single spell. Not unless you know the Spell of Disjunction, anyway, which neither you nor your tutor do. It's a rather niche bit of magic, and one that's disliked by many people, precisely BECAUSE it's so good at stripping away the magic of things, taking items that are the product of countless hours of hard work and costly sacrifice and reducing them to so much worthless junk.

Without Mordenkainen's Most Maligned Magic, properly disenchanting an item can take hours, even days of constant effort, according to the relative strengths of the magic-user and the object they are bending their power upon. As this is your first serious attempt at the task, Batreaux takes the opportunity to turn the late afternoon outing into a lesson, walking you through a final analysis of the enchantments within and upon the Fae blade, showing how you should target them for destruction, and describing how the magic of the item is likely to fight back to preserve itself.

Then he steps back, raises a few defenses around the two of you so that you can focus all of your attention on the job at hand, and lets you go to work.

Once again, for formality's sake, you unleash a variety of elemental insults upon the weapon, verifying its resistance to common forces and substances. Some of the durability thus demonstrated is the work of the reinforcement and preservation effects gifted to the sword by the magic that runs through it, but when you account for that known element, the damage that remains gives you at least a partial idea of how tough battle-silver is.

When that's done, you get down to the serious business.

It takes hours for you to unravel the matrix of magic woven through the substance of the sword. The grimstalker's blade resists as much as it can, of course, but your sheer power outclasses its own from the outset, two or three times over in fact. No, the true cause of the delay is your own inexperience with the techniques in question, which even with Batreaux's guidance, turns the entire attempt into a learn-as-you go venture.

But that's fine by you. You've stolen some of your best moves on the go.

Gained Disenchantment F

By the time the sun touches the horizon, you've finished disenchanting the sword... and in the process, you note with a grimace, you appear to have done something inimical to the stability of the Faerie silver. As the spell-lattice breaks up, great plumes of silver-black smoke begin to rise from the weapon with a poisonous hissing. You take several steps back and shift so you're upwind of the blade, letting the reaction burn itself out and the smoke blow away before you attempt to move closer.

When you do step forward again, all that's left is a blackened trail of degraded metal. Large portions of the blade are simply gone, as if bitten off by powerful jaws or eroded by acid, and what's left... well, it doesn't register as poisonous, although some of the bits are clearly still sharp.

You're going to need to study this melted mass in your lab to figure out what it actually is, and get a better idea of what went wrong.

Lost Grimstalker's Sword
Gained Grimstalker's Sword-Shards

While you have several hours tonight that you can spend working on that particular problem, that might not be enough to nail down the answers you seek. Do you want to go ahead and try disenchanting the Grimstalker's Armor tomorrow, or put it off until you have a better idea of what went wrong with this attempt?

It strikes you as a poor idea to simply forge ahead with disenchanting the Grimstalker's Armor without first understanding what went wrong with your attempt to break down the Faerie blade. Granted, you've only got a couple of weeks before your Midsummer deadline comes around, and you're going to be busy for a portion of that, dealing with the Quincy and everything, but you think you can afford to take a few days in the meantime to focus on this.

It helps that it's summer.

With that decided, you spend the remainder of the night and much of the following morning in your workshop, studying the blackened leftovers of what used to be a sword. Without magical analysis, you doubt you'd have learned anything, but Divination and Summoning Magic open many doors between them, and by lunchtime on Thursday, you've confirmed the following:

First, the "meltdown" of the battle-silver fused some of the sand the Grimstalker's Sword was laying on, so part of the blackened mess is actually just crude glass, with a bit of carbon mixed in where pieces of plant or animal matter got caught up in the reaction. You can pretty much discard that without worry.

Second, most of what remains of the actual blade is silver, alloyed with a small amount of copper and traces of other metals. In addition to the scorch marks, it's been heavily tarnished, as if subjected to decades of exposure in the mere minute or so that it took for the weapon to break down. A little polish is all that would be required to make it good as new, but you leave that for another time.

Third, and entirely unsurprisingly, the magical readings you get from the Sword-Shards are sharply different from those the proper blade gave off. The aura of the battle-silver is almost completely gone, with only faint and muddled echoes of Earth, Fire, Water, Light, and Shadow left to suggest that the mundane metals gathered before you were once anything more.

Gained Metallurgy F (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Production (Swords) D (Plus)
Gained Science D (Plus)
Updated Grimstalker's Sword-Shards

Finally, and most relevant to your current purpose, the Fae essence that was bound up in the blade is simply gone, without even the residual traces of the elemental forces. And this makes you think.

Battle-silver, as you know, is not a natural substance, even by the weird standards of Faerie. If Briar's account of it being forged from moonlight is accurate, then some investiture of energy by the smith would have been necessary for the stuff to take solid form, and by extension, to hold that form. In other words, the metal bore an enchantment entirely unrelated to the ones laid upon the sword as a whole, and when you attempted to unravel the latter, you accidentally disrupted the former as well.

This is both good news, and bad.

The good news is that all you have to do not to disintegrate another sample of battle-silver is to go much lighter on the Abjuration Magic when you attempt to strip away the secondary enchantments that cling to it.

The bad news is that you're quite a long way from developing that degree of finesse with this particular magical talent. Worse yet, you have no idea how long it would take you to hone your skill at disenchantment to the point where you could pull apart the Grimstalker's Armor without destroying the battle-silver in the process.

On a related note, you're almost one hundred percent certain that the Grimstalker's Bow is not going to dissolve when you remove its enchantments, so you'll at least get a slightly-weathered, mastercrafted Faerie bow out of all this.

Still, what to do about the Grimstalker's Armor? Two weeks probably isn't going to be enough to build up your Disenchantment skill; you don't have enough magic items to spare for the scrapheap, nor the time to acquire them. Possibly not the funds, either. And since you do want to break the easy trails the Fae Lord might use to track you, it looks like your only options are to either sacrifice the battle-silver entirely (and refine your skill a little bit more in the process), or hand it off to someone that could do the job in your stead.

You DO know a few powerful magic-users that might be able to do the job, one of whom even has ties to the Fae and is just the sort of nosy bugger who might have learned a trick or two from them despite their efforts to the contrary. For that matter, you could hand the Grimstalker's Armor over to Navi for Robin to unmake, although you suspect that if you did things that way, you probably wouldn't be getting the battle-silver back.

"Yeah, probably not," Briar agrees when you float that idea. "Robin isn't exactly paranoid about his secrets - he lets some of us watch him work, once we're sensible enough not to get in the way, and even answers questions about some stuff - but he knows you're a sorcerer, your choice of birthday reverse-presents gave away that you're into item-crafting, and by now he's probably heard that you looted the grimstalker's corpse. Add all of that up, and..."

Yeah, if you were a mage-smith dealing with someone who had a history like that, you wouldn't trust you not to poke at your secrets, either.

"I think he'd still take a commission from you," Briar adds, "at least for something he knew you'd value too much to turn around and break down, but he's definitely not going to just hand you ingots of battle-silver to mess with."

Disappointing, but not unexpected.

While a part of you would like to disenchant the Grimstalker's Armor, if only for the practice, the greater whole considers such an action to be a needless waste of good material. Instead, you decide to send the mail shirt off to Robin for disassembly, reasoning that the battle-silver the smith reclaims from the armor ought to cover the cost of hiring him.

Thinking on it a bit more, you decide to place an order with Robin as well. Kahlua's birthday is coming up in about three weeks' time, and between moving the Quincy off-world, dispatching Shadow Alex to join in the attack on Silbern, ducking the attentions of that Fae Lord, and finally recovering from all of the above, you'll have little time or mana to spare for getting her a present.

True, you did say back at your birthday that the gifts you were handing out then were intended to cover the ones you'd otherwise owe all your friends, but you're allowed to change your mind. On top of that, you'd hate to be the only guest invited to Kahlua's tenth birthday who didn't bring a gift.

In light of your time constraints, outsourcing some of the work just makes sense. Furthermore, in keeping with last year's gifting of the reworked remains of an enemy you defeated yourself, the idea of asking Robin to reforge a bit of the battle-silver from the Grimstalker's Armor into, say, a necklace, holds a certain grim appeal.

You do have one concern, though, and that's the question of whether battle-silver would be safe for a living vampire to touch. You know from observation and research that mundane silver is a bit problematic for them, even when it hasn't been specifically weaponized, and enchanted silver even more so; there's a reason why all the sealing jewelry you've seen is made out of silver, after all. And you've just confirmed that silversteel is as much magic as it is physical material, so...

You make a note to talk with Robin about this when you see him, and inquire about what options might be available to address the issue. Maybe if you asked him to mount the silver in something that wouldn't be irritating to wear, like a pendant...?

With the disposal of the Grimstalker's Armor covered, all that remains is the Bow. Following lunch and Zelda going to her room to nap, you leave the house and head out to another random-ish spot in the desert, where you set up another Illusion-cloaked Private Sanctum, re-summon Batreaux, and get on with the final analysis and subsequent disenchantment of the weapon.

THIS one puts up a fight. While it took several hours to unravel the magic of the Grimstalker's Sword, you had such an edge in raw power that you started feeling progress after the first hour, and started seeing it by the end of the second. With the rather more powerful bow, you spend three hours straight struggling just to get a metaphysical grip on the magical matrix worked into the wood, before Briar and Batreaux call a halt.

"It's getting on towards suppertime," Briar informs you.

Your stomach rumbles in agreement.

"Also," Batreaux says, "this is starting to look like the sort of job that will demand a full day's effort."

And you'd planned to go mining in Faerie tomorrow, which is the sort of thing you'd like to have a full tank for. Mentally checking your schedule, you figure that there's no real harm in delaying the disenchantment of the Grimstalker's Bow for another few days, although the option of handing it off to Robin for disposal with the Armor does come to mind. True, a bow isn't the sort of thing a smith customarily works with, beyond making arrowheads, but an enchanted weapon is an enchanted weapon, right?

Cleaning up the traces of the afternoon's incomplete work, you return home-

"Where were you all day?" Zelda demands, almost as soon as you come through the door.

"Bark!" Moblin agrees.

-and field the protests of a little sister who was quite annoyed to find that you "snuck out" when she was asleep, and a dog that's perfectly happy to join her in scolding you. Or just making noise.

What time will you head to Faerie tomorrow? As a reminder, you have to visit and mine anywhere from three to seven different ore deposits, depending on individual yield, but you've already been to all of the sites in question, so travel time won't really be an issue.

If you knew for a fact that Robin had actual experience working with bows - and especially magical ones - you might have been more inclined to let him handle the disenchantment of the Grimstalker's Bow. As it is, the only reason you can see to send the weapon to him is because you'd run out of time to deal with it, and that's simply not the case.

You put the banaan's bow away and make a mental note to come back to it later. Maybe as soon as this Saturday, depending on how Friday's trip to Faerie goes.

Thinking it through, you decide to get the earliest practical start to your mining trip.

For one thing, you've already made Navi, Robin, and the rest of Briar's family wait a couple of weeks on this; even if they do completely understand and approve of your desire NOT to go wandering around part of Faerie during the new moon, when the local moonsilver deposits would have attracted some of the nastier spirits to them, it's still a delay in the completion of your "Second Trial" to pay for Navi's aid in saving the various Quincy families. That's a debt you want cleared and gone as soon as possible just on general principle, let alone because of the nature of the one you owe it to.

Friendly or no, Navi IS still Fae. It would be a bad idea to get into the habit of making her or anyone like her wait for a payment owed.

Quite aside from that, you don't yet know how long it will take to dig out the raw materials you require, so it would be foolish to assume you can have this business over and done with in the time it takes you to teleport between the deposits. Particularly when there are a few locals who might try to talk to you again, although checking the notes you made and that Robin annotated, the only encounter you can guarantee is with those Fae fish.

In any event, having made your choice, you make your preparations accordingly, and not too long after the sun has risen over Sunnydale on the Ninth of June, you slip out of your house and head for the forested hills.

"You realize Zelda is going to be upset with you for sneaking off before she even woke up, right?"

You do. Maybe you should get her a souvenir of the trip, or something?

"What would she like, though?" Briar wonders. "I mean, even if the ores weren't spoken for, they aren't really that shiny, so I doubt she'd be satisfied with 'rocks.' I didn't see any particularly impressive flowers, either, outside of the Raka Tree's immediate domain - and we couldn't take one of those, even if we were headed back there." Your partner pauses. "Are we headed back there?"

You pass - or are passed by - three or four cars as you make your way to the town limits. None of them react to your presence, but then, you ARE running around at Ki Enhanced speeds with a ritualized Spell of Invisibility up. Once you're actually out of town, you open up the throttle, Body Flickering along the forest road until you reach the spot where you've made contact with Navi before. Here, you pause to dismiss your spell of concealment, and then make a Sending to let the Great Fairy know you're ready to begin the day.

A minute later, the response comes back: "Zzzz..."

As the snoring runs out the limits of the magic and abruptly ends, you and Briar trade glances.

Across the familiar bond, you feel your partner's sudden sense of mischievous glee.

"Alex," Briar says slowly, "would you be a dear and cast that spell a second time, please?"

While you already have Lady Chloe's permission to move through and harvest materials from her territory, and so technically don't need to visit her again, it would only be polite for you to stop by and greet the lady of the land (and her lord husband). Plus, it'd be easier to confirm if there have been any significant happenings, comings, or goings in the area since your last visit if you spoke to the two of them directly.

Still, you don't feel a particular need to catch up on Fae rumor and gossip at this time, so you figure you can wait a while to check in with the Great Fairy and Great Tree.

You are a good partner, which means you have a fair idea of what Briar intends to do if you dispatch another Sending to her mother.

Does it make you a lesser partner, that you choose not to dissuade her, or a greater one? Or does it just make you a kid?

Regardless, you cast the Spell of Sending, and direct one end of it to your familiar bond to allow Briar to speak through the magic. When the spell is set, you give your partner a nod.

Briar clears her throat.

"GOOOOD MORNING, FAIRY MOM!" She pauses for a long moment - you get a silent sense of counting through the link - and then adds, "This is your daughter on Earth, wondering whether the planes have fallen out of alignment, or you just overslept."

Message recorded, the spell vanishes into the ether.

"What was that first part about?" you inquire.

"I saw it in a movie, back before we met," Briar says. "'Good Morning Vietnam.'"

"I don't think I've seen that one," you muse.

"It came out a few years before you were born," Briar admits.

Further discussion is curtailed by a sudden cry of "Waah!" from thin air. "Who, what, how- oh, for the Goddesses' sakes, Briar! Do you have ANY idea what TIME it is over here? I have half a-"

And the return message runs out of words.

"Think we should have waited?" you wonder.

"Eh," Briar replies indifferently. "It already took you ten minutes to re-cast the spell."

Divine presence and glimmering light manifest then.

"I suppose you think that was funny," Navi growls.

"Absolutely!" Briar says without shame. "And not just because I was able to give you a fairy wake-up call!"

Almost in spite of herself, Navi asks, "Oh?"

"Alex has a tradition of calling his friends' moms at ridiculous hours. What sort of partner would I be to pass up a chance to continue the trend?"

As you throw a look of mild reproval Briar's way, you sense Navi's attention turn towards you. "Is this true, Alex?"

Navi sighs. "I swear, this was NOT how I imagined this day starting... never mind, let's just get on with it."

In short order, she has Gated you back to the trilithon at the approximate center of Lady Chloe's domain. You immediately notice that, unlike last time, you aren't alone.

"Robin!" Briar says cheerfully, as she flies over to hug her biggest brother's cheek. "Good morning!"

"Good morning, Briar," the smith returns the greeting. "Picking on Mom, are we?"

"You know it!"

"Thatta girl."

The Great Fairy sighs again. "Ungrateful brats, all of you."

You take the time to check out Robin's change of attire. He's still wearing a typical fairy/Kokiri/Link-style green tunic and a belt's worth of pouches, but he's wearing the former over a long-sleeved white-ish shirt that's made of a thicker material, dark blue leggings, leather gloves that come up almost to his elbows, and heavy, knee-length boots. All the additional articles of clothing seem to be reinforced in some manner, with extra padding on the elbows and knees, metal studs on the knuckles and the backs of the hands, and something that isn't steel or battle-silver bracing the toes of each boot.

You half-expect to see the hilt of a Hylian sword peeking over the Fae's shoulder, but in its place, you spy a pickaxe, a shovel, and a hammer. Once again, the heads of the tools are neither silversteel nor any form or alloy of iron.

"So what brings you out today?" Briar asks her sibling.

"It occurred to me that we never asked if your partner knew anything about digging out ores," Robin replies, before glancing questioningly at you.

"Not really," you admit.

He nods. "Now, in my experience, the standard response for a sorcerer who can't do something on his own is to throw magic at the problem until it goes away-"

A fair assessment.

"-but I would prefer to keep these ores untainted by magic as much as possible, to make less work for myself going forward. So I volunteered to grab some tools, come along, and show him how it's done."

You wouldn't call it a "tradition," exactly...

Even though she's not physically present or visible, you can almost see Navi quirk an eyebrow at you. "What would you call it, then?"

Honestly, it was just a few unfortunate accidents due to you not having internalized the difference in time zones.

"...what is a 'time zone'?" Navi asks after a moment.

That takes a little explaining. Not because Navi is unfamiliar with the concept of it being different times in different parts of the world - she has plenty of experience with that phenomenon from her own experiences with teleportation, let alone planar travel - she simply isn't familiar with how Earth decided to handle the issue.

Hyrule, after all, doesn't have long-range travel or communications on the sheer scale that Earth does.

As Briar puts it, "When you've got sorcerers, witches, and the like flying or teleporting around fast enough to outrun the sun, whatever time they lose or gain in the process is their own problem. When you've got thousands of people and tons of cargo doing the same sort of thing every day, though, it's the KING'S problem."

Which is accurate enough, you suppose, substituting "king" for "government in general."

Seeing as how Robin is concerned about magical contamination of the ores, you ask him if there would be a problem with spells - or indeed, supernatural effects in general - meant to enhance the caster's body or the tools he was using to harvest the material.

"If the power in question only affects the body, if it's cast at a safe distance from the ore and the tools, and if your only contact with the materials was through your tools, that should be safe enough," Robin replies easily. "Augmenting the tools themselves, though? That can be questionable, unless you spend a lot of time testing the enhancements on various substances beforehand. These" - he reaches up and back to give the pick, shovel, and hammer at his back a quick backhanded pat - "I know the properties of by heart, as well as the effect they'll have on the ores we're after."

"I wouldn't worry too much about breaking Robin's tools, Alex," Briar adds. "As long as you don't give yourself the strength of a full-fledged giant, or turn into one again, they'll hold up."

So today is probably not going to see the return of Alex the Ten-Foot Tall Not-Yet-Ten Year-Old. Fair enough.

"What about my basic aura?" you ask then.

"That's more of a problem, given how energetic and... ah, 'unique'... your aura is," Robin admits with some hesitance. "At least when you're throwing around magic and other forms of active power. You left traces of your energies all over several of the samples you took, which is one of the reasons why I'd like to avoid a repeat today. Like I said, I CAN clear that sort of thing out if I have to, but-"

"-but it's quicker and easier if you don't have to," you finish, nodding. "So, to sum up: keep my distance from the ore deposits while activating enhancement techniques, and until my aura has settled in the aftermath; don't use enhancement techniques on the tools; don't handle the material with my bare hands; and I probably shouldn't teleport us too close, either."

Robin nods. "Sounds like a plan."

"Then I will leave you all to it," Navi says.

"Yeah, you can go back to bed, Mom," Briar replies. "We got this."

Navi's disembodied presence seems to glare at her daughter for a moment before vanishing.

"I see someone's decided to live bravely this morning," Robin observes, giving his much-smaller sister a glance.

Taking Robin's advice into account, you might as well set up your desired enhancements before you start teleporting.

Also, do you have a preference for which ores you go after first? Looking at the sites Robin reported as good, you're not particularly likely to run into anyone while mining the Goddess copper, unless Cat and Ulfr or some complete unknowns show up. The moonsilver deposit, on the other hand, has those guardian fish to consider, in addition to any parties that happen to pass by.

You're going to scry the location sungold before you go near it, just to be sure that Fae Lord hasn't showed up ahead of schedule or sent anyone else in his stead. You don't want any of that trouble, and you doubt Robin is interested in it either.

In light of Robin's remarks, you decide to forego some of the more exotic spells you were using when you came through this part of Faerie on your prospecting trip. That said, since you're still kicking around Faerie - even if it's a part you've been to before and where you know some of the locals, or maybe even BECAUSE of those factors - and because you have some hard, physical work ahead of you, you go ahead and cast the standard array of physical enhancement spells.

Before doing so, however, you ask Robin if he'd care to share. It's not like you don't have the means to do so easily, or the mana to afford it.

"I wouldn't mind," the smith replies.

That settled, you cast the Spell of Augmentation.

Once the enhancement magic has settled, you ask Briar and Robin if they're okay with hitting the sungold deposit first. Your reasoning is that, since it's the most potentially dangerous of the seven sites for the three of you to visit, it's best to see to it first. Not only will this get it out of the way as quickly as possible, but if a threat does rear its ugly head, you'll all be fresh and prepared to deal with it, rather than worn down by the effort of digging at anywhere up to six other ore deposits.

"I can agree with that much," Robin says, nodding.

"Are you sure about this, Alex?" Briar asks.

You quickly add that you were planning to scry the location before making a final decision.

"Oh, in that case, never mind."

With no further objections forthcoming, you settle in to cast a modified Greater Spell of Scrying, sacrificing most of the duration out of a practiced desire not to waste time or energy. The site of the sungold deposit swiftly forms within the scrying sphere as it hovers before you, and everything looks much as you remember it from your last visit. The grimstalker's pit-trap yawns to the sky, just as you left it after being forced to trigger it, and nothing and no one else is visible, even when you rotate the sensor to sweep the-

!

-well, now.

"I know that reaction, Alex," Briar sighs. "Are we doomed?"

"No, no, nothing like that," you reply calmly. "It's just... well, look there." You point to a spot on the sensor.

Briar hovers closer, peering at the image-

"Oh!"

-and quickly spots the bunny-like animal sitting near the bushes at the edge of the clearing. You don't call it a rabbit outright because you know hares are a thing, but also because this lapine specimen is over three feet long, and has a spiralling horn rising another six or seven inches from its brow besides.

"I see what you mean," your partner admits. "That's a hopeful sign."

Yeah, with the grimstalker and some of its predatory plants dead, it appears that the animal residents of Faerie - who were distinctly absent from that area on your last visit - have started to re-populate the indiscriminate killer's former territory.

"You know," Briar adds a moment later, "provided Bugs there isn't working for anyone."

"What do you suppose the chances of that are?" you ask seriously.

Briar shrugs. "No idea. I'm not quite sure what... he?... is. Robin, any idea?"

From where he was standing a couple of steps to your left, the smith moves a little closer to the scrying globe and squints at the image.

"I'm not sure," he says after a moment. "It doesn't remind me of anything that I've heard of living in Hyrule or the neighboring areas, or the near parts of Faerie."

"Okay, that's a little more concerning."

"Neither of you recognize it?" you query.

"Nope," Briar says shortly. "Now, granted, Faerie is a BIG place, and even the long-term natives don't always know everyone or everything living nearby. And our family IS native to Hyrule. So it's possible that this rabbit is a natural resident we just didn't know about."

"But he could also have foreign origins," you nod, "either personally, or through an ancestor."

"In which case the question becomes, 'how did he get here, was somebody else involved, and are they keeping an eye on him right now?'"

That's three questions, Briar.

Still, when you extend your exotic senses through the Spell of Scrying, you don't detect anything especially menacing from the horned rabbit. Faerie Sight registers his presence, albeit faintly, so whatever his ancestry, he's definitely a local. Just not a very strong one. Mage Sight picks up an aura of Elemental Earth, Transformation Magic, and Necromancy about the rabbit's horn, something that honestly puzzles you in the intended effect. Yes, it seems pretty clear that the horn is dangerous, somehow, but the way the different energies are blended together is just bizarre.

You don't pick up any traces of wards, binding spells, or long-range Divination Magic - nothing that would suggest the horned rabbit is somehow allied to a greater power, instead of simply being a Faerie creature going about his own business.

Extending your visual and extrasensory sweep to the rest of the area you can view through the scrying globe returns a similar lack of suspicious results. The aura of the sungold is as it was, marked by the Darkness of the grimstalker's killing spree, but perhaps a bit "lighter" now that the murders have stopped and the one responsible for them has faced a rough justice at the hands of his victims. Similarly, the aura of spiritual energy is still higher than normal for this neck of the extra-planar woods, but a bit calmer than you recall it being.

Everything you can see or otherwise sense about the location says it's safe.

"Are we going?" Briar asks.

"...give me a few minutes."

You invoke the Spell to Know the Enemy, trying to get a better idea of what sort of creature you're dealing with.

The magic flows out, and information flows back into your mind. The horned rabbit appears to be an almiraj, a moderately intelligent, aggressive, territorial, and either omnivorous or outright carnivorous lagomorph whose horn carries the power to pertrify its victims - but only when it strikes a lethal blow. That would explain the odd blending of Transmutation, Earth Elementalism, and Necromancy in its aura; were it capable of petrifying at a touch, the necromantic element would be absent.

Aside from the curious properties of their primary natural weapon, almirajes are peculiarly susceptible to certain applications of witchcraft, something which makes the creatures a popular choice for familiars in lands where they reside. There is some speculation among the educated in such lands that the beasts were bred and augmented for just that purpose, before somehow ending up in the wild, but no one seems to know for certain.

Interestingly, the species is known on Earth, though as a unique creature that supposedly resided on the mysterious "Sea Serpent Island," somewhere in the Indian Ocean. That almiraj was given to Alexander the Great as gift by the locals, after he rid them of a serpent or dragon - the specifics are a bit blurred - that had been preying on their livestock. Not much else is granted to you by your brief communion with the Goddesses, save a passing mention of some medieval bestiaries, heraldic emblems, and... video games?

Why are you two looking at me?

I wonder.

As the magic fades, you share your findings with Briar and Robin, but add that you didn't pick up any indications of this particular almiraj being bound to anyone or anything. Of course, it could be under a Magic Aura or similar effect, but you have enough confidence in your sensory skills and Divination Magic that you'd like to think you would have spotted such a trick.

On the other hand, if you were to put together a list of beings that could fool you with Illusion Magic, a Fae Lord would be at the top of the list. But would such a proud and powerful being bother to claim a creature as comparatively weak and humble as an almiraj as a familiar in the first place?

"Seems unlikely," Briar says, "but that could be what he WANTS people to think."

"Or the almiraj could be a more typical sort of vassal, instead of a familiar," Robin notes.

"Or it might not have any connection to this guy at all," Briar concludes.

In short, it boils down to a single question: do you go, or not?

You decide to take a few more precautions before going for the gold.

First, you change your appearance. There is an impulse to cast a Spell of Illusion for this, but Illusion Magic has to interact with its environment to work - even spells that occur entirely in the mind(s) of the audience have a structure extending between them and the caster - and that runs contrary to Robin's concerns about potentially contaminating the sungold. In addition, you know that Illusion Magic is one branch of the arcane arts at which the Fae in general tend to excel, making even a relatively minor specimen like the almiraj more likely to notice its use, let alone anyone who looks in on the proceedings.

As such, you opt for another Spell of Transformation. When it comes to magical disguises, the Spell to Alter One's Self is just as effective as the Spell to Disguise One's Self - once you've increased its duration a bit, at least - and it has the added bonus of augmenting some of your physical characteristics, though which ones depend on what form you take. On that note, you choose to turn into...

Once your new form has settled, you check to see if Robin wants to alter his appearance, but he's fine going as himself.

"Yeah, if it turns out to be trouble, he can hide behind Mom."

The biggest brother sends a flat, unimpressed look at his much smaller sister.

"What? You're a good smith, Robin, but unless things have really changed since I've been stuck on Earth, you haven't got nearly enough of a rep on Faerie to shield you from a ticked-off lord on your own merits."

Robin considers that, and then turns to you. "On second thought, I think I will take that spell, actually."

*ZAP*

And now Robin looks like a Gerudo boy - one of the ones who got the darker skin tone, some of the size, and none of the nose. Seeing as how Navi's family has no blood connection to the various Zeldas and Robin isn't a reincarnation of Link, this is safe enough.

Briar doesn't need a disguise, as she can simply hide in your pocket, but before teleporting to the sungold deposit, you cast one additional spell: a Spell to Summon a Monster, the formula for which you leave open-ended, and supplement with a prayer to the Goddesses for a creature that can distract the almiraj and lead it away without hurting it.

Let me see...

You have a few decisions to make as you're setting up the formula. For starters, how powerful do you want this prospective creature to be?

In addition, and keeping in mind the mana costs, how long do you want your bait lure summoned helper to keep the horned rabbit away from you?

You roll your enlarged shoulders, squint your darkened eyes against the perpetual twilight of the Fae realm - which seems a bit less dark, now - and take a deep breath of the forest air, noting as you do so that you can vaguely smell the ancient stone of the trilithon.

The scent fails to provoke any desire to take a bite, but whether that's because the Spell to Alter One's Self isn't quite a complete transformation, because you aren't currently hungry (having just had breakfast), or because the stone is somehow unappealing to the Goron palate, you cannot say.

Robin has to look up a bit to meet your gaze now, but he does so without real difficulty, and merely nods as he takes in your new appearance.

"It's a better form than most for mining," he admits. "Even if we aren't going underground."

"That was my thinking," you agree.

You set the parameters of your Spell to Summon A Monster at third-tier, with the duration extended by a significant degree. In your estimation, this should give you something capable of defending itself against any aggression from the almiraj on more or less equal terms, and for more than enough time for you and Robin to finish harvesting the sungold ore.

With a final call to the Goddesses, you enact the spell.

Here we go!

*PORK*

...seriously?

Before you stands a Bullbo, tusks and bristles glinting as if made from metal, piggy eyes glowing faintly green instead of the bloody red you would have expected from your previous dealings with beasts of the porcine persuasion. This one isn't a patch on the Raging Boar, and is smaller than the Great Island Boar; judging from vague memories of roughly human-sized Bulblins riding such beasts in pairs, you'd say this one is about half-grown.

This isn't a Ganondorf comment, is it?

No! Nothing of the sort! ...well, maybe a little - but it fits the parameters of the spell!

Shrugging at the Goddesses' choice of aid, you cast the Spell to Speak With Animals and try to channel the essence of your totem as you speak.

"Greetings. I am your summoner."

The boar grunts an acknowledgement.

"I have called you here to drive off - NOT seriously injure or kill - a large horned rabbit, so that my companion and I may dig undisturbed."

The Bullbo looks around, and lets out a puzzled oink.

"No, the almiraj is not here. We were just about to travel to its location by magic."

Grunt again.

"Good."

Gesturing for Briar to land and Robin to move closer, you place one hand on the Bullbo's fat flank and form the equations for a teleport.

"Remember," you tell the boar, "I only need the rabbit chased away. It is not to be wounded or killed."

This time, the grunting carries a distinct overtone of, "Yeah, yeah."

Shaking your head and mentally crossing your fingers, you complete the spell, and the world around you blinks.

Instead of standing before the trilithon, you're now standing in the clearing where you defeated the grimstalker. Oinking in surprise and confusion, the Bullbo takes several heavy, slightly staggering steps around, before shaking its heavy head and beginning to sniff the air.

"That way," you gesture, pointing towards the undergrowth on the far side of the field.

The warty head turns in the direction indicated, and you see the greenish eyes narrow and gleam in anticipation before the Bullbo begins to paw the earth.

"Bwuh-bwee-BWEEEE!" it declares, as it charges off.

The almiraj takes one look at the oncoming short wall of pork and takes off like the rabbit it resembles.

"Remember, chase only!" you call after the bellowing beast. "No killing!"

You're not entirely sure if the Bullbo hears you. If nothing else, it stays on the almiraj's trail, storming into and through the unfortunate bushes with a great crashing and cracking of greenery, before disappearing from sight.

Gained Animal Handling C (C (Plus) pigs)
Gained King of Beasts C (C (Plus) pigs)

Shaking your head, you dismiss the communication spell and turn to Robin. "Shall we?"

"...I suppose we should."

Robin takes his time checking out the ground on which the sungold sits. Some of this is just making sure where the grimstalker's leftover traps are and aren't located, and accordingly, how much room the two of you have to work with, but more seems to be the actions of seasoned prospector, taking in the geography and geology and figuring out where would be the best place to start digging.

After a few minutes, Robin slides the tools off his back, setting the shovel and hammer on the ground while holding the pick-axe out to you.

As you accept the implement and get a feel for its weight, balance, and fit in your enlarged hands, a thought occurs: "Do you happen to know any traditional Goron mining songs?"

In the middle of drawing a smaller pick and hammer from one of his belt-pouches, Robin pauses. "I know A Goron mining song. How traditional it is, I couldn't tell you."

As the two of you get started, he hums a few bars, surprising you with the same song you found yourself humming while you were prospecting.

Then the two of you settle in to work.

Gained Geology F (Plus)
Gained Mining E
Gained Music D
Gained Singing F (Plus) (Plus)

It takes a bit for you to get a good rhythm going, but with Robin showing you where to strike and provide other encouragement, you slowly start to get the hang of swinging a pick.

Gained Axe Training E
Gained Pick Training F (Plus)

True, it's more enthusiasm and brute strength than skill that see chunks of stone gradually torn free of the exposed deposit, but you've got enough of the first two to spare, and the last will come with time.

About an hour and a half on, Robin calls a halt, saying he has enough sungold for his current needs, with enough extra to allow for a modest margin of error. For your part, you've got a good, clean ache of effort going, particularly in your hands and arms, which for all their strength and conditioning, aren't quite used to this particular set of repetitive motions or the repeated impact of not-steel on stone. There's been no sign of the Bullbo or the almiraj since they vanished into the brush, but your Spell to Summon A Monster has yet to lapse, indicating that the boar is still out there.

Although nothing has come of it so far, the appearance of the almiraj has nonetheless left you a little on edge. For that reason, you decide that now would be a good time to speak with the local authorities.

You say as much to Robin and Briar.

"Yeah, they should be awake by now," Briar agrees.

"Just let me finish packing up," Robin notes, as he tucks one last handful of fragmented ore into a pouch and pulls the drawstring tight. The small pick and hammer disappear as well, the larger tools are retrieved, and with that, he's good to go.

A fairy on one shoulder and a fairy's hand on the other, you cast a short-range Spell of Teleportation, and blink away to the border of Raka's "home."

As he removes his hand from your arm, Robin looks up at the Great Tree with an air of familiarity.

"For the record," you offer in a hushed tone, "you might want to be careful with comparisons to the Great Deku Tree."

"Oh?"

"There seems to be something of a rivalry there-"

"Halt, in the name of Mom and Dad!"

And once again, fairies interrupt.

"Identify yourselves and state your business!" Guardsman Newt proclaims, holding his little spear in a non-menacing but very businesslike manner.

"Wow, he's a big one!"

"And he's an even bigger one! ...at least, I think it's a he...?"

"Do rocks have genders?"

"This is a good question."

"And she's... actually, she looks kind of familiar."

"It's the blue girl! Only she's red!"

Robin spares a sidelong speculative glance at his little sister at that one. "'Blue girl'?" he murmurs.

"His fault, entirely," Briar says, throwing you under the bus without a moment's hesitation.

"Pfft, pull the other one, it's got bells on."

"What, really? Let me see!"

"It's a figure of- ACK! Let go!"

You clear your throat with a sound like scraping gravel, and then fall back into the character you previously established with these little ones.

"HAIL, GUARDSMAN NEWT, AND WELL-MET ONCE AGAIN."

Robin does a double-take at the sudden volume of your voice.

Briar slumps in mid-air. "Oh, Goddesses, not this again."

Heh.

I accept no responsibility for this.

Sorry, kiddo; you're just going to have to bear with it.

The little spear-wielding fairy looks up, and up, and UP at your Goronified form. "Holy holly-berries," he murmurs. "Sorcerer? Is that you?"

"What!?"

"The heck you say!?"

"Impossible!"

"Unthinkable!"

"I mean, he IS a sorcerer..."

"Yeah, turning into other things is a thing they do, sometimes."

"But why a rock? How does that help?"

"Can't be any worse than turning into a snake!"

"I'M IN DISGUISE," you explain.

There is a collective "Oooohhhh..."

Newt clears his throat. "Right, then. So what brings you back this way, sorcerer, Miss Briar? And who's your companion?"

You quickly sort things out with the little guard, and soon enough, have secured yourself an escort to the Great Fairy and the Great Tree. An argument breaks out among the little fairies, however, as they try to decide "which way" you should go.

About a quarter of the group say that, since you're on foot, you should walk.

An equal number say that would be boring, and that you should fly again.

The third quarter want you to walk, but to take "the tunnels," which they seem to think will be exciting enough to make up for the slow pace.

The last fourth are either doing their own thing, or sighing in resignation (Newt).

"Aw, no," Newt groans. "Guys, we don't have time-"

"Take him to the tunnels!" the little fairies cheer.

"-for this, why do I even..."

"This way! This way!" One of the green-glowing sprites directs you forward and a bit off to the right of the Great Raka Tree.

You follow along at your best speed, which - given your current form - is a bit on the slow side. Between their overall size, a build that favors brute force and resilience over almost anything else, and the shortness of their legs relative to their stature, Gorons aren't really built to go fast, although... wasn't there something...?

"HANG ON A MOMENT," you declare. "LET ME SLIP INTO SOMETHING A LITTLE MORE PRACTICAL."

While the fairies buzz about in puzzlement, you suck in your gut - it's all muscle, really! - bend forward at the waist, and then keep going.

"He's turning into a ball!" one of the brighter fairies exclaims.

"It's like magic!"

"...is it magic?"

"No," Briar sighs, "Gorons can just do that."

"Neat! What's a Goron?"

That remark earns at least four tiny facepalms.

As it turns out, you can't quite pull off the famous Goron roll. Some of that is down to the terrain, which is uneven to start with and broken up by all manner of plant growth besides, and more is a result of the lack of practice; you don't exactly go tumbling about a lot while in human form, and you've even less experience at such maneuvers in your current state. You also suspect that your low-powered transformation either left out a few subtle details of Goron physiology, or else didn't get them quite right, because while having your head down by your knees is an interesting sensation, it's also moderately uncomfortable, something you think would get a lot worse very quickly if you started rolling about the way you know true Gorons can.

Not that you're about to do that. There are far too many fragile little people fluttering about.

Still, tucking yourself into an approximately sphere-shaped mass lets Robin roll you along ahead of him without too much trouble, and the casual walking pace doesn't cause you any real discomfort.

Gained Rolling F

After a couple of minutes, the fairies lead you to an opening in the earth, where one of Raka's immense roots appears to have... hollowed out?... creating a roughly circular passage almost ten feet across, with curiously smooth wooden walls, floor, and ceiling broken up by the presence of dirt, patches of fungi that have taken over various surfaces, and smaller living roots that either grew out of or just punched through the dead wood. With Faerie's prevailing twilight atmosphere, the mouth of the tunnel darkens quickly, but your Goron eyes can easily make out some glowing bioluminescent blue mushroom not too far inside, and a patch of purple-hued moss further on, which between them keep things well-lit enough for fairies and other night-sighed beings to manage.

You might have a problem if you were walking around in your natural form.

"Behold, the Tunnels of Raka!" the green fairy proclaims. "The Tunnels of Mystery! The Tunnels of DOOM!"

"DOOM!" most of his siblings chorus.

The fairies cry out and scatter in surprise as you throw back your oversized head and bellow the name of, "DOOM!"

"What the heck!?"

"What happened!?"

"HAHAHAHA! DOOM!"

"Is he okay?"

"THE DREAD NAME - IS SPOKEN!" you gasp, while putting on a show of struggling against some unseen force. "THE DARK - INVOCATION - IS CAST! THE SPIRIT - IS - OVERTAKING MEEEE...!"

All the while, you make the effort to cast a Spell of Illusion as subtly as you can.

"Oh, crap!"

"What have we done!?"

"What do we do!?"

"DOOM!"

"Quick, somebody call an exorcist!"

"In FAERIE!?"

Briar and Robin trade glances.

"Does this happens a lot with him, then?"

"I refuse to be held responsible for my partner's random bouts of temporary insanity."

Newt looks from them, to you, and then back again. "Should... I be getting ready to stab him, or what?"

"Oh, don't tempt me."

Ignoring those comments, you focus on your magic. As it takes effect, a thin yet luminous fog seems to envelop you, menacing laughter echoing from within and somewhere far, far away. The stony elements of your current form seem to shift to steel, even as they are swiftly covered by the folds of a dark green tunic and cloak that unfurl themselves from nowhere. A Goron-sized sombrero swirls into being atop your head, while bandoliers loaded down with eerily glowing crystals snake across your massive chest. And even as a sinister visage of cold, unmoving iron takes over your face, a long mustache springs forth.

"BEHOLD!" you boom, to an appropriate CRACK! of thunder. "EL DOOM RETURNS!"

The pronouncement is punctuated by a brief riff of trumpets and castanets, and that one appropriately green fairy crying, "DOOM!"

Your head turns in that direction, and in a slightly quieter and calmer tone, you advise, "IT IS 'EL' DOOM, LITTLE ONE."

"EL DOOM?"

"THERE YOU GO. WE TRY AGAIN ON THREE, OKAY?"

"Wait, do you mean, 'one, two, and then go on three,' or 'one, two, three, and THEN go'?"

"THE FORMER."

"Okay, then."

"OKAY. ONE, TWO-"

And then the riff repeats. "EL DOOM!"

"EXCELLENTE!"

Gained Spanish F (Plus)

"NOW THEN," you rumble, turning your attention to the rest of the crowd, "HOW IS IT THAT EL DOOM'S PRESENCE HAS BEEN SUMMONED TO THE REALM OF FAERIE THIS DAY?"

"I have no idea!"

"Yeah, we're innocent!"

"FOOLS!" the green fairy roars, as loudly as someone smaller than the tip of your little finger can. "YOU DARE SPEAK THE NAME OF EL DOOM, AND THEN FEIGN IGNORANCE?"

"You traitor!"

"THE NAME, IS IT?" You stroke your chin and the fake mustache that dangles over it in a pose of thought. "AND HOW DID THE NAME OF EL DOOM COME TO BE KNOWN TO YOU?"

From there, you get a quick summary of the origins of the Tunnels of DOOM.

Long, long ago - as much as a century, if your escorts are to be believed - after a number of their children came off second-best in an encounter with some of the local giant spiders - not related to Liantiel, you are assured - Lady Chloe and Lord Raka discussed the safety and future of their family.

"Mom was all, 'Dying isn't good for them' and 'I don't want my babies to have to remember being eaten,' and Dad was like, 'This sort of thing is why trees don't move around much,' and Mom said, 'Don't you get smug with me, mister,' and Dad said, 'Yes, dear' in THAT way, you know, the one that really isn't sorry-"

Cutting the chatter short, Raka reshaped a portion of his root system into a winding maze, half-subterranean and half exposed to the sky, wherein fairies of all sizes could wander in search of ADVENTURE! without being put in serious risk of getting crushed, eaten, or otherwise killed. It's full of little mysteries, surprises, tricks, traps that are embarrassing rather than harmful, and the occasional strictly non-fairy-eating Fae critter, and the roots move around from time to time, closing off old passages and opening up new ones to keep things interesting.

"YOU ARE SAYING THAT YOUR PARENTS MADE A DUNGEON FOR YOU TO PLAY IN," you sum up.

"Um... I don't THINK anybody's ever been locked up in the Tunnels," one of the fairies offers.

You wave that off. "DIFFERENT SORT OF DUNGEON."

"So... are we going in?"

You peer into the fungus-lit shadows of the underground tunnel, and consider.

"NO," you say after a moment. "NO, WE SHALL NOT BE GOING IN."

There are some "Aww"s of disappointment, but one of the fairies - a yellow-hued one - just has to get clever.

"Oh? Is the great El Doom afraid?"

"SLANDER!" your little green ally roars. "YOU DARE IMPUGN THE COURAGE OF EL DOOM?"

"EL DOOM FEARS FEW THINGS," you say over the tiny shouting, as you direct an entirely in-character glare at the yellow fairy. "BUT ONE OF THOSE THINGS IS TO GO BACK ON A PROMISE - AND EL DOOM HAS PRIOR COMMITMENTS THIS DAY."

"Okay, that's a good reason," a random fairy notes.

"Yeah, promises are important."

"Can't argue with that."

When your would-be accuser either can't muster an argument to the contrary, or maybe just chooses not to, you nod, turn to Newt, and tell him to lead the way to his parents. The little guard does so, and you tuck and roll after him with further assistance from Robin.

Gained Rolling F (Plus)

About four minutes of rolling later, you have to unfurl yourself and start walking again, as the ground is becoming steep enough that you would be imposing on Robin's goodwill to ask him to keep pushing you along. Although this slows your progress a bit as you trudge to the top of the "hill" - actually a tangle of several of Raka's giant roots - once you have reached the crest, you spy a way to make up the lost time.

A smooth-sided, moss-covered wooden trough runs down from the peak of the root-hill. A fair-sized pool of water sits to one side, its contents draining into the slide and pouring down, down, down to the far end, where another, larger pool sits. Fairies drift about the surface of both bodies of water, and recline on mushrooms scattered about the shorelines. As you watch, one of the little Fae lands atop a leaf that is floating out of the uppermost pool, and rides it onto-

"WHEEEE!"

-and down the waterslide, yelling in exhilaration the entire way.

"Okay," Briar says. "I admit it. I'm jealous."

Robin makes no reply, but is visibly calculating as he eyes the dimensions of the slide.

Briar catches the look, and sighs. "One crazy project at a time, Big Brother, or I'll tell Mom my partner is a bad influence on you."

While that's going on, you watch your little troop of escorts make their way over to and down the slide. Some of them ride leaves like their sibling, while others grab strips of dried-out and smooth-polished bark. A few just fly down, hovering close enough to the surface that the downdraft of their wings produces tiny, short-lived furrows in the water.

"Oh, wow!" one of the fairies that didn't come here with you exclaims. "That guy's huge!"

"And that guy's even huger!"

"And she's... actually, she's pretty normal..."

"Do you think they're going to go for a slide?"

"They must be! Why else would they be up here?"

"It's a free forest, isn't it?"

"Hardly! We live under the tyranny of Mom and Dad!"

"Is that really tyranny, though?"

"Down with the parental oppressors!"

"You keep talking like that, and Dad's going to take away the slide."

"Up with the parental oppressors!"

"Hey, hey! How big a splash do you suppose they could make?"

"I bet the bigger one could empty the pool!"

"Yeah!"

"That would be awesome!"

"Wouldn't that kind of wreck things, though?"

"Nah, it'll fill up again."

"Might take a while, though."

"He IS kind of extra huge, isn't he?"

Honestly, the prospect of blasting all the water out of the lower pool is only part of the reason why you give the slide a wary glance. While the thing is wide enough that even your Goron form could fit, it's also steep enough - and the pond at the bottom small enough - that if you just rolled all the way down, you think you could very easily overshoot and hit solid ground. A true Goron wouldn't be anything more than inconvenienced by such a crash-landing, but your assumed form is not a true Goron, and lacks something of the species' innate qualities - sheer rock-like toughness, for one.

Also, you don't want to cause damage to the things growing in Raka's territory. The stuff that isn't actually part of the Great Tree that is his body is growing on top of it, which is reason enough to be cautious.

That said, you think if you slid down normally, whether on your belly or your back, you'd be okay, as you wouldn't build up nearly as much speed in those positions. You could also revert to human form, or just walk down the stairs off to the right of the slide - but where would the fun be in that?

You look down the watery incline, and hesitate. You didn't come here to play games, and every minute you spend doing so or otherwise delaying in today's quest is a minute of Robin's time effectively wasted. That's not the sort of summoner and magical deal-maker you aspire to be.

On the other hand, when you glance at Robin, he's heading over to a tree-trunk taller than you are, which has a bunch of fairy-sized boards resting about its base, and a score of larger ones. As you watch, Robin inspects the largest of the boards, and then - apparently finding none to his taste - he puts both hands to the trunk of the tree, digs in his fingers, and pulls.

With a gentle surge of Fae essence, a piece of bark as tall as the smith simply strips off the side of the tree. Robin takes a moment to dust off the bare side, then nods, turns around, and comes back over to you. Without a word, he drops the "board" into the pool, rough side down, and leaps on top of it; despite his broad-shouldered build and all the extra weight Briar's biggest brother is carrying, his board hardly reacts, shifting a little to one side and settling perhaps a sixteenth of an inch deeper in the water.

"See you at the bottom," Robin says cheerfully, as the current carries him towards the slide.

"A new challenger approaches!" one of the fairies cries.

"Will he ride the rapids to glory?"

"Or will he WIPE! OUT!?"

"Wipe! Out! Wipe! Out!"

"Surf! Surf! Surf!"

"BY ANY CHANCE," you inquire of Newt, "HAVE ANY OF YOU EVER BEEN TO CALIFORNIA, OR PERHAPS HAWAII?"

"Not this bunch, but we've got a few older siblings who've been to both." Newt shrugs. "They're the ones who gave Dad the idea for this place."

"AH."

"Here he goes!"

You direct your attention back to Robin, and watch as he goes over the edge and starts riding the current and the incline down the half-chute. Despite the unworked nature of the downward-facing side of his board, the Fae smith seems to have a smooth ride, gaining speed quickly as he leans forward with a practiced pose.

"HE'S DONE THIS BEFORE," you observe.

"Rapids Ride in summer, Snowpeak in winter," Briar confirms. "He used to go sand-surfing, too, before Bacon Breath showed up again and the deserts got too dangerous."

Part of you wonders if you should apologize for that.

Another part grumbles that it's YOUR Din-damned desert, and the fairies - especially one of the spawn of the former Hero's partner - can just buzz off.

The greater whole chooses to remain silent, spectating as Robin reaches the little bend at the bottom of the slide and is launched into the air, curving through a long arc that gets about a third of the way across the lower pool before it goes into a terminal descent-

!

-at which point Robin takes flight in truth, wings emerging along with a cherry-red glow akin to molten metal, carrying him along his original trajectory as his board falls away from beneath his feet.

"Oooh!"

"Aaah!"

As the little fairies make noises of appreciation, Robin folds up his wings, dials down the glow, and then looks back up the slide at you.

Oh ho!

And smirks.

Are you going to let him get away with that?

Oh.

I give that jump a solid eight out of ten.

Oooh...

...wait, what? You're not going to protest?

No. No, El Doom will not be baited-

Why would I? I happen to like water games, thank you very much.

"Banzai!" Briar cries, flying past you with an appropriately sized bark-board.

-but you are apparently alone in your resolve, and must now watch as your partner goes barreling full-tilt down the slide. While she doesn't achieve the kind of speed her brother did, something that seems to be as much a lack of practice as a lack of mass and hence momentum, Briar still gets enough velocity for her board to arc a couple of feet out and up in a scaled-down echo of her brother's performance.

Gained Boarding F

She does the mid-air takeoff bit, too, and flies over to perch on Robin's shoulder, looking up at you.

Briar's too far away and too small for any visible indication of her thoughts or feelings to be apparent, but through your familiar bond, you pick up expectation, challenge, and confidence.

Well.

Can't let your partner down, right?

You would so hate to disappoint her.

Quickly casting the Spell of Flight, you will the Illusion of El Doom's "possession" to flicker as you stride to the top of the slide, as if his dark spirit were suddenly having to fight for control.

"EL DOOM!? WHAT AILS THEE, GREAT ONE?"

"Is he going to-?"

"I think he is!"

"Clear the air!"

"Awooga! Awooga!"

"Slide! Slide! Slide!"

After taking a moment to make sure that all the little fairies are out of your impending slide- and flight-path, you roll yourself up and then use your active spell to provide a little forward push.

*Splash*

That's enough to start you rolling, slowly at first, the lip of the top of the slide almost stopping you-

"Here he goes!"

"This is gonna be awesome!"

"This is going to be a mess!"

-but a subtle shift of your mass tips you over the edge and down, and then DOWN, and then FASTER-!

Gained Iron Stomach E (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Rolling F (Plus) (Plus)

Somewhere in the midst of a lot of spinning, you feel a sudden LURCH and a momentary sense of weightlessness. Peering past your legs, you catch a glimpse of Faerie spinning surface-over-sky, and judging from how far behind and below you the slide is in that brief moment, you're close to halfway across the pool, which means that yes, you're definitely going to hit the far shore - or something farther past it! - if you let mundane physics have its way.

And so, before gravity's cruel fingers can take hold of you once again, you lean on your Spell of Flight and will yourself to go more or less directly up, hoping to make it look like the majority of your momentum transferred to vertical lift rather than horizontal thrust. You also take the opportunity to get control of your spin, untucking yourself to get a clear look around, and especially down.

And then, at what looks and feels like an appropriate height, you come to a momentary halt, curling back up and bellowing, "GOOOORRRROOOONNNNBAAAALLLLLLLL!" as you plummet back to earth.

Gained Agility C (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)

*KER-SPLA-CRASH!*

And the next thing you know, you're on the bottom of the pool, feeling somewhat sore and really quite glad you called up your Ki Armor before impact, to say nothing of that last-minute gulp of air.

Gained Earth Resistance E (Plus)
Gained Water Resistance F (Plus)

Uncurling again, you rise to your full height, stride far enough to get your head above water, and then breathe out and start taking in the damage.

The pool is still there, but its previously mostly still surface is now a seething mess of wavelets, and you're standing in a Goron-sized and -shaped depression that you doubt was there just a moment earlier. Everything and everyone within a good fifteen feet appears to have been caught by your splashdown, with leaves dripping as if there had been a sudden and intense downpour, the grass flattened, the turf muddied, and a dozen or so fairies knocked out of the air.

"Aaah-hahahaha!"

"That was AWESOME!"

"BOOM!"

"Wow, I think I saw my lives flash before my eyes!"

"So. Much. Water..."

"Everybody, sound off! Who's dead, and who just wishes they were?"

"Me!"

"Seconded!"

"I can't feel my anything!"

"EL DOOM!? EL DOOOOM!?"

Despite those worrying comments, it soon becomes clear that nobody's dead, crippled, or even all that battered. Tiny as they are, fairies can be surprisingly resilient, particularly where the forces of Nature that they live alongside and partially embody are involved.

That, and the Goddesses protect fools and small children.

We try, but they don't make it easy.

Case in point.

Once the "casualties" are sorted out - and a certain green fairy assured that, though El Doom's spirit was banished by the power of the holy waterslide, he will not be defeated so easily - you offer to cast the Spell to Create Water to refill the pool to its usual level, but the fairies assure you that the pool will sort itself out.

With that done, you turn to your companions, who are both perfectly dry, thanks to a shield you saw briefly as you exited the pool, before Robin tucked it away in one of his pouches.

This just doesn't seem fair. In the name of good sportsmanship, you take a large, dripping step towards your companions.

"Alex?" Briar asks. "What are you-"

Your great sopping wet arms come up.

"-oh no, don't you DARE-!"

And then, with a great wordless bibble of flapping lips and cheeks, you shimmy. Side to side, up and down, front to back, arms and torso, head and belly. While not as water-retentive as a good thick coat of fur, your rock-like Goron flesh has enough crags and crevices and tiny pits in it to have caught and carried along a reasonable amount of the pool's contents all the same. It also helps that you have a particularly large surface area in this form.

For a moment, it's like the clouds have opened up again.

Gained Pranking E (Plus) (Plus)

"Ack!"

"Oh no!"

"Watery death, incoming!"

"Again!?"

"Swept Away Two: Downpour Boogarglewarble!"

"I should have brought an umbrellaaaa-!"

And then you are mostly dry.

And Briar and Robin are-

!

-still dry. Robin managed to get his shield out again fast enough to intercept the spray, at least for himself. Briar was too far away from her brother for him to cover her, but she seems to have caught on to your intent in time to throw up a Spell to Resist Water.

Good reflexes, there.

Briar expresses her annoyance by conjuring a tiny jet of water and spritzing you in the face.

Good aim, too.

It's another ten-minute walk to your destination, a trip that's made a bit shorter by the collective decision of All the Fairies to leave the waterslide and follow along, just to see what crazy, silly, dumb, fun thing you'll do next. Their cheerful chatter and scattered rainbow of lights fill the air, and you find yourself acting as transport to a good twenty of the sprites, their presence along your head and stony shoulders making you look like an oddly festive ambulatory boulder.

"You can see everything from up here!"

"We can fly higher than this, you know."

"Yeah, but this way I don't have to do anything!"

"That's a good point..."

When you reach the hollow where you had your previous audiences with the local authorities, they're already there, waiting for you. Newt does his little introductory bit - you're announced as "guest" instead of "prisoners" this time, you are pleased to note - you, Robin, and Briar bow to your hosts - the smith's gesture a little shallower than your own - and then you get down to talking.

Aside from inquiring about the arrival of the almiraj and any other local developments since your last visit, is there anything you want or need to ask?

First up, you inquire about the most pressing matter: that of the horned rabbit, and whether his presence portends anything problematic.

The answer to that is, "Probably not," since as far as Lady Chloe is aware, the almiraj is not sworn or bound to anyone or anything except itself. He really is just one of the beings, beasts, and spirits that have been cautiously moving into the grimstalker's former territory since you put the little psycho in the dirt.

Expanding on the topic a bit, the Great Fairy adds that she's not sensed any agents or representatives of the lord who dispatched the banaan poking around the region. She expects one to show up any day now, however, as her nominal peer customarily sends one of his courtiers to speak with her a week or two in advance of his own arrival.

On the surface, it's a combination of diplomacy and sensible precaution. Send a messenger to let the locals know you're coming on schedule (or not, if something has come up), and to make sure there's been no developments in the area since your last visit that might pose a problem for the upcoming one - or at least get a heads-up to prepare for them.

In actuality, Chloe takes no small amount of offense at the whole business. Bad enough that she was tricked into allowing the Fae equivalent of a serial killer to run rampant in her domain, that her given word prevented her from raising her hand against the little monster or taking punitive action against its master, or that she and hers could no longer safely access the valuable sungold, but to have to be promptly reminded of it, every year, is just insult compounding the injury.

It hasn't helped that the lord's chosen emissaries have largely been a batch of insufferable twits, mixing arrogance, ignorance, smugness, condescension, and other negative elements of aristocracy with enough political savvy and station to keep from giving the Great Fairy cause to boot them out or declare her agreement with their liege-lord ended.

Lady Chloe expounds upon the subject for some time, never quite reaching the level of a proper rant or tantrum, but nonetheless making clear her aggravation with the entire business, as well as her anticipation of the next emissary's reaction, when they discover the grimstalker's untimely demise.

"Out of curiosity," Robin inquires, "you didn't happen to agree to the provision of replacement guardians in your deal, did you?"

Lady Chloe smirks. "As it happens, I did not."

Meaning, if the Fae Lord wants to replace his little watchdog, he's going to have to bargain for it. And this time, Chloe's ready for him.

Good to know.

With the major issues out of the way, you ask about more general local affairs. One that particularly comes to mind is whether or not that swamp barbeque cook-off you took part in has caused any problems.

"It's had mixed consequences," Chloe replies. "The mobogo took a week to sleep off that meal, and the boggards were hunting a lot less in that time as a result. On the other hand, when the toad-demon started showing signs of waking up, one of his priests whipped the hunters into a frenzy to have breakfast waiting for their master."

Probably trying to avoid getting eaten himself, you muse, recalling the skull-wearing toad-priest who faced you in the cooking challenge. The mobogo DID say that the loser would "join him for dinner"...

"The boggards normally stick to the swamp," the Great Fairy goes on. "Partly because it's the territory they're best suited to, partly because the biggest insects live there, and partly because they don't often have the food to spare for extended hunts. But since they had a week where the mobogo wasn't eating half of what they could gather and hunt, they had the time and resources to prepare some preserves. Between that and their leader's encouragements, they've been ranging farther out and trying their hand at hunting other prey."

Huh.

Forewarned that the boggards are moving beyond their marshy borders, you ask Lady Chloe if there is a particular way she'd prefer you to get in touch with her if your little party runs into them - or for that matter, if you encounter anything else out of the ordinary that might merit her attention.

"You won't have to do anything special," the Great Fairy replies reassuringly. "I've been keeping one eye on you since Navi dropped you off. If you find something odd, I'll let you know."

You can only smile and nod at that, while trying to keep the hairs on the back of your neck from standing up in concern at the news that you didn't sense someone observing you remotely.

Not that you think a Great Fairy is going to do anything outright bad to you - frustrating, certainly, maybe potentially dangerous, but nothing in any way malicious - but you've gotten used to being able to notice things like that, and the reminder that powerful non-human beings can watch you from a distance without drawing your attention upon themselves is... unsettling. Especially here in Faerie.

Perhaps it's because of your sudden unease that you ask your next question: whether there's anything you, a mortal sorcerer in Faerie, should be aware of, beyond the common sense bits like listening to your elders and your partner, not getting eaten, and so on.

The answer to that is a definite "yes."

Chloe advises that, if you go wandering, it's best to stay close to areas you can easily reach from Earth - and conversely, which Earth can be easily reached from. You also want to stay out of other established domains unless you have been invited in, but at the same time, you need to avoid go wandering too deep into the greater wilderness.

"You want to stay on the edges of the domains as much as possible," she says. "Far enough outside of them not to be trespassing, but close enough to benefit from some of their stability."

From the way she says that last word, you get the impression Chloe isn't just talking about political stability. You say as much, and she nods.

"There is some of that, yes, but the greater concern is that the deeper you venture into Faerie, the more wild and uncertain everything becomes. It's not just a matter of increasingly dangerous natives and uncharted wilderness, although that's certainly a concern, but the laws of physics as you're used to them start to... bend."

"You remember those Fae I mentioned who watch the different timelines in Hyrule?" Briar asks all of a sudden.

You do, albeit dimly. It's been long enough since you had that conversation, you can't actually remember when it was or what you were talking about - at least not off the top of your head.

"Well, they live far enough out in the Deep Wild that Time is kind of... fuzzy."

"DEFINE 'FUZZY' FOR ME, BRIAR."

"Sometimes it's consistent with Hyrule, sometimes it's faster, sometimes it's slower, sometimes it flows forwards and sometimes it goes backwards, and every once in a while you'll look into the Material Plane and realize it's a completely different Hyrule."

...that sounds like a terrible hassle to live with.

"Only if you like causality."

On a related note, Chloe advises that if you end up in the Deep Wild due to mischance or enemy action, you should find the nearest domain and sit on the border until someone finds you, and then strike a deal to get back to the more stable parts of Faerie as soon as possible.

"Don't try to teleport or plane shift out on your own," she warns. "Not even from inside one of the domains. You won't like what happens."

Her tone is distinctly ominous.

Continuing with Chloe's counsel, while she recommends avoiding contact with strange Lords and Ladies as much as possible, if you DO happen to encounter one outside of their territory, you should be courteous, honest, and polite but firm in refusing any attempts by the other party to offer you a gift you haven't done anything to earn, take you back to their domain without an accompanying offer of hospitality, or otherwise exert their authority over you and/or put you in their debt.

Conversely, if a Fae Lord somehow ends up under YOUR authority, you'd be best served by letting them get out of it as quickly as possible, in as formal a manner as possible. They dislike being subject to mortals, but they also don't appreciate having their obligations discharged via trivial tasks that don't allow them to display their "awesome power and majesty" - to borrow a phrase.

You think back to Jermafencer and Lord Tepes's encounter with the heir to the Lord of the Withered Wood, and how that got resolved with the upstart youth in question being given a legitimate shot at becoming a Knight of Hyrule. Assuming he succeeds in that endeavor, he'd be under mortal authority for potentially a very, very long time... on the other hand, the Goddesses ARE the ones who hold the Knights' oaths, and there's that whole "anything a mortal can do, a Fae can do better" element to consider.

Further relating to interactions with the Courts, Chloe warns you not to eat or drink anything offered to you, unless it comes from someone who's granted you hospitality or that you know you can trust not to feed you something nasty wrapped in a glamor.

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY 'NASTY'?" you inquire with some wariness.

"Moldy bread," Chloe replies.

"Rotten fruit," Briar adds.

"Spoiled meat," Robin continues.

"Dirt with a side order of worms," Raka says.

You give the Great Tree's avatar a startled look at that.

"It doesn't taste any better to me in this form than it would to you," he replies, making a face.

Chloe's advice is by no means exhaustive - you'd need years to learn everything she knows about Mortal Safety in Faerie, and even then, her knowledge is not guaranteed to be complete - but it reinforces your basic common-sense precautions, corrects a few erroneous assumptions, and otherwise does a good general job.

Gained Faerie Lore C (Plus)
Gained Local Knowledge (Faerie) E (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)

The last thing you ask Chloe is if she's aware of any sort of Fae, apart from Great Fairies and lesser ones, that would be safe for younger and weaker mortal children to play games with.

"What's wrong with fairies?" one of the kids protests.

"Yeah!"

"I mean, we are kind of dumb..."

"Speak for yourself!"

"THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH FAIRIES," you reply firmly, before that tangent can get out of hand. "IT'S JUST THAT I ALREADY KNOW ABOUT YOU, AND I FIGURED THAT GREAT FAIRIES WOULD BE TOO BUSY TO HAVE TIME FOR GAMES."

"Yeah, that's true."

"Mom's always got SOMETHING she needs to do."

"Like pulling certain dummies' butts out of the fire..."

"It was not a fire! It was a spider's web!"

With a wry smile, Chloe says that she knows of a few types of Fae she would generally consider to be trustworthy with children - nymphs, elder dryads, fauns, a few others - but most of those tend to be bound to certain locations, powerful enough that they'd have greater concerns to worry about, and/or no longer extant on Earth or willing to travel there.

"Too much in the way of demons, undead, and general unpleasantness these days, to say nothing of the environmental issues."

Yeah, the place has problems.

The Great Fairy also notes that there are certainly individual Fae of various other races and types that would make reasonable playtime companions or outright caretakers for human children, provided certain quirks and qualifiers were taken into account.

"Young Cat, for example, would likely make a good friend to a human child of similar age, provided they were the outdoor type and able to keep up with her. Her friend Ulfr wouldn't be a BAD companion, but..."

Yeah, a giant wolf without the means to speak might not be the best choice to hang out with little kids. Ulfr seemed like a good sort, but you did only meet him the once; even if your first impression turned out to be accurate, he could still hurt someone unintentionally, by misjuding their toughness during play or giving them the wrong idea of how to interact with mundane wolves.

With your questions asked, and time ticking away, you thank Chloe and Raka for their time, and request permission to teleport your party on your way.

They grant it, and you head for the riverbank, to mine some moonsilver.

Despite Chloe's foreboding tone, you go ahead and ask her why it wouldn't be a good idea for you to try to teleport or plane shift out of the Deep Wild.

Ignorance, after all, is not bliss. It's one of the main reasons why people get hurt in the first place, alongside enemy action and carelessness.

"As I said, the Deep Wild is somewhat unstable," Chloe replies. "It never progresses to the point where physics actually break down, mind you - this isn't Limbo, after all - but when space and time are constantly shifting around you, trying to move through them via magical travel becomes a poor idea, at best."

"Think about the Hellmouth, Alex," Briar advises.

"She said Hell!"

"You said a bad word!"

"Moooom! Acorn swore!"

Briar pauses for a moment, until it's clear Lady Chloe is more concerned with wrangling her kids than chiding your partner for "swearing." Only then does she continue.

"You avoided teleporting there because you didn't want to have any accidents or disturb anything, right?"

"RIGHT..."

That, and you didn't want to risk leaving a trail for the unfriendly locals, nor did you enjoy the experience of seeing and feeling a horrible, all-consuming Maw of Evil and Chaos lurking just under your feet the first time you tested your teleportation spells inside Sunnydale proper.

"And that was on the Material Plane, where things are basically stable, aside from a few weak-points like the H-upwelling of Chaos and Evil." Briar pauses again, to see if any of the littler fairies catch on to her slightly clumsy evasion, but she seems to be in the clear this time. "Anyway, the Deep Wild is basically nothing BUT weak-points, so accidents would be... a lot more likely."

And you know from your studies that teleportation mishaps can get... messy.

"I WILL KEEP THAT IN MIND, SHOULD WE EVER FIND OURSELVES IN THE DEEP WILD."

Not much more to be said at this point.

Your subsequent use of a teleportation spell drops you, Robin, and Briar some distance back from the shore of the river where the moonsilver is located, far enough from the water that the ground under your feet is grass and soil rather than mud.

Robin looks around, and frowns. "You weren't kidding about this one location having its problems," he observes.

"INDEED. SPEAKING OF WHICH, WHAT DO YOU FEEL WOULD BE THE BEST APPROACH TO MINING THIS DEPOSIT? I'M CAPABLE OF CASTING A SPELL OF WATER-BREATHING, TRANSFORMING US INTO FORMS CAPABLE OF BREATHING UNDERWATER, SUMMONING SUITABLE HELP, OR JUST WALLING OFF THAT PART OF THE RIVER, LIKE I DID LAST TIME."

Robin considers those options.

"What about the fish?" Briar asks.

"...what ABOUT the fish?" Robin inquires.

"RIGHT, SO, ABOUT THE FISH..." You explain what happened the last time, and add that you're unsure if the victory your summoned Big Octorok won for you then entitles you to take more moonsilver now. The fish weren't the most talkative sorts.

The blacksmith listens, head bowed and a thoughtful frown on his face, silent but for the occasional, "Uh-huh" or "Hmmm" of reaction.

Then he shrugs. "Let's ask them."

Taking out his shield - because you did mention how the fish took pot-shots at you - Robin heads for the shore. You and Briar trade glances, echo Robin's shrug, and follow along in his wake.

The river is as you remember it, flowing swift and pure, with elementally aligned fish-like presences swimming around beneath the surface.

Standing on the shore with the toes of his boots just in the water, Robin clears his throat.

"Heeeere, fishy, fishy, fishy!"

...

After a moment's silence, silver-blue fish-heads break the surface of the water.

"Hello!" Robin calls out, waving to them.

The fish regard him for a moment, and then turn to you and Briar, staring.

"HELLO AGAIN!"

Ignoring what may have been a diplomatic faux pas on Robin's part, you greet the fish with a broad, beaming smile and a wave.

"YOU MIGHT REMEMBER ME AS THE SORCERER WHO CHALLENGED YOU FOR A SAMPLE OF THE MOONSILVER A WHILE BACK."

At that, the entire school comes to the surface, and spits tiny spheres of water into the air at harmless angles. Then they do a collective backflip, resulting in a splash, after which ten of them rise once more, emerging from the water as if "standing" on their tails. One of them is off by itself, facing the rest, which have adopted a formation of eight in a ring around the central ninth member.

The fish swim like that for a moment, and then all ten of them do a synchronized backflip, coming down with a deliberate splash.

"AH, YOU DO REMEMBER!"

As the school reforms, one of its members squirts water more directly at you. The spray lacks the force to reach you, falling short in the water, and doesn't come near either of your companions, making you think it's not an attack, but more... a probe? A question?

"YOU ARE CURIOUS ABOUT MY CURRENT FORM?"

The fish bob up and down in unison.

You bend down a bit, and in a gravelly whisper that carries over the noise of the river, explain: "I AM IN DISGUISE. THIS WAY, NO ONE WILL RECOGNIZE ME."

Bobbing intensifies, and you swear you hear bubbly giggles.

"Since when does your partner speak fish, Briar?" Robin wonders quietly.

"Knowing him?"

Gained Aquan F

"Probably about now. But I think it's more that he's good at reading body language and getting along with Fae and animals."

Clearing your throat and forebearing to comment on the chatter, you explain to the fish your purpose in coming to their part of the river today.

If they weren't already put off by Robin's "greeting," the admission that he is a smith - and thus works with the dread Element of Fire - seems like it would be enough by itself to make the fish goggle-eye him with caution. You press on despite that reaction, declaring your intent to mine some of the metal.

"AND THIS TIME," you continue, "I BROUGHT SNACKS. IF YOU'LL GIVE A FEW MINUTES TO PREPARE?"

The answer is a lot of eager backflips.

With that, you set about casting the Spell to Create Food and Drink. Given that each of these fish is as big as your arm, and that there are about a dozen of them, you figure that it would take... hmmm... say, a quarter of a human child-sized portion to feed one of them? So you'll need to conjure the minimum amount of food the spell allows, to avoid the possibility of over-feeding them. That said, there is the question of what TYPE of food you ought to conjure. Create Food and Drink is limited to "simple fare," but once upon a time - in another Fae landscape, as it happens - you pushed it to creating cheap pizza and bland pop. You've improved much since then, and had much more practice conjuring food, if by different means.

As for the diners-to-be... you're no expert on piscine anatomy, but the jaws of these fish look large and strong, and you caught flashes of sharp teeth in your prior encounter - especially when the giant summoned fish tried to swallow you whole. That one was practically a mirror image of the river-dwellers before you now, merely writ large.

So, what will you feed them?

On a different note, the Spell of Augmentation that is boosting your physical capabilities is on the verge of failure, and the Spell to Alter One's Self providing your Goron disguise is not far behind it. Do you want to refresh these spells?

Never having kept fish or conducted any particular study of them - much less of FAE fish - you aren't a hundred percent certain what their dietary requirements are. This presents a non-zero chance that any single type of food you conjure for them now is something they can't or just won't eat, or which might even be bad for them.

As such, you figure it's best to provide as broad a selection of foodstuffs as the Spell to Create Food and Water will allow, and let the river-dwellers pick and choose for themselves.

So it is that, when your magic resolves, what materializes above the surface of the river is a modest spread, sufficient to feed three kids of your own *ahem* not inconsiderable hunger, which looks like it was pulled from the pages of a grade-school food guide. Crumbs of cooked bread and unprocessed grains scatter across the water like rain, accompanied by diced fruits and shredded leafy vegetables that could almost be taken for local berries and greenery. A selection of filleted fish and dead insects rounds out the menu, tiny, hard-shelled bodies hitting the water almost like flung stones, but then bobbing along like wood - at least until something sneaks up below to snap them down forever.

The only thing missing from the "table" you've set is milk products, which was a deliberate choice on your part. Fish aren't mammals, after all, and you have no idea if they can process milk. Best not to chance it.

As you watch, the fish set to their meal with a will. The fish and insects disappear rapidly, as do the bits of fruit and vegetables. The soaked-through bread is and drifting seeds are picked at more conservatively, but a fair amount of that gets eaten as well. When the feeding frenzy fades, there's very little of your conjured meal left - perhaps half a serving - while several fish bob up and down on the surface, looking contented.

Given the situation, you figure there would be less chance of contamination if you confined your magic use to yourself and your companions, and let the river go about its business undisturbed. While water isn't a "hard" barrier to most magic, it is a cleansing element by nature, at least when allowed to flow freely from a natural, uncontaminated source. This river qualifies on all counts, and its breadth and depth would provide the moonsilver below with a certain amount of "soft" protection from magical taint.

Such a defense would mean little against spells meant to part the river, raise the earth, or just unleash a massive amount of destructive force, but less violent magic, cast at a distance - on the shore, for example - and not aimed at the river itself would be a different story. Which is one reason, alongside your practiced mana control, why you didn't hesitate to conjure food for the fish.

You consult with Robin and Briar, who agree with your reasoning, and then go ahead and renew the failing Spell of Augmentation on yourself and the smith.

Once that's done, you turn to your faltering disguise. The Goron's form was helpful in mining the sungold, but given the limitations of the Spell to Alter One's Self, the physical benefits were considerably less than those of the magic you've just re-cast. In addition, since you've decided not to mess around with the river's flow, you're going to need to be able to breathe underwater going forward - a requirement easily met with another change of form.

As such, when you cast the Spell to Alter One's Self this time, you assume the form of a Zora. In this state, you're nearly as tall as your Goron-ified self was, much more slender but still stronger than your natural body due to having taken on adult proportions. And not only can you breathe underwater, but when you step into the river, you feel an unfamiliar instinct welling up, telling you to move thusly to make a smooth entry, to swim like so to minimize the energy you waste fighting the current, and that it will be easier to maneuver forward and back - or to roll - than along other axes of movement.

You offer to transform Robin as well, but he waves off the suggestion, instead reaching into one of his pouches to pull out-

!

-a suit of blue-tinted mail that seems to have been made entirely from the scales of a giant fish, and an oversized pair of brightly polished bronze boots.

"I did a Zora a favor a while back," the smith explains, as he begins divesting himself of his belts and other gear to pull on the Zora Armor. "Made the Boots myself, though."

Once he's dressed for the occasion, Robin fetches the one-handed pick and hammer, as well as the shovel, then begins to stagger to the water's edge, Bronze Boots thudding and banging with every step. When he hits the river proper, Robin just keeps trudging along, the weight of his forged footwear keeping him firmly on the bottom.

It's kind of eerie to see a man walk himself under the waves like this. Even your Zora pseudo-instincts are a bit put off, though that's more because of the utter gracelessness of the method.

"KEEP AN EYE OUT, WILL YOU BRIAR?"

"You can count on me. Just remember you've got a time limit on that spell, okay?"

You nod, and then take a running leap into the river.

Briar's cautionary reminder proves to be merited, as does Robin's selection of lesser tools. Being submerged adds a lot of drag on certain movements, and while the hand-pick and small hammer are light enough that they can still be employed, the sort of overhand swing required to make proper use of a two-handed pick would be untenable under these conditions. The shovel, on the other hand, can be thrust forward not unlike a spear, adding some much-needed striking power to the effort.

It's still a slow, messy, aching, exhausting business. Where harvesting some sungold took about an hour and a half, the same amount of time working on the moonsilver sees you accumulate only a fraction of the bright ore - and from Robin's reaction, he needs a lot more of THIS magical mineral than he did the last one.

You try to sing to pass the time, but the Goron Mining Song comes out as a trail of bubbles and gurgling sounds, hardly musical at all.

Gained Geology F (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Singing F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Swimming D
Gained Water Resistance F (Plus) (Plus)

The fish, meanwhile, circle about the two of you, watching your efforts. Perhaps it's your Zora form's influence on your perception, but you'd swear the silver-blue Fae fish are laughing at you.

This is... frustrating, to say the least.

You have to stop and take a moment to consider the situation.

From the perspective of the fish, this whole situation probably is a bit ridiculous, isn't it? After all, how often does one see a fairy and a boy-turned-fishman mining the bottom of a river, even in Faerie, which is peopled by pranksters ranging from innocent to malicious, and where unusual things occur as a matter of course?

Yeah, you can see the humor. Kind of. And while it isn't amusing enough to make you laugh on its own, the fish are free to find it entertaining.

As you turn to rejoin Robin, you pause, something about that last thought nagging at you. You try to chase it down.

Fish.

Free.

Freedom in water.

Freedom of... oh, Nayru darn it.

I don't knit.

Badump-tish!

...I don't get it.

At this, you kind of have to stop and laugh.

One of the problems with having such expansive magical capabilities is that, if you don't use a particular trick on at least a semi-regular basis, you inevitably forget about it.

Swimming back to Robin, you catch hold of his arm and - when he turns your way with a questioning look - gesture for him to follow you back to shallow water.

A minute of tromping and sloshing later...

"How's it going?" Briar asks, flying over as the two of you emerge from the river. "Are you done?"

"Maybe about a quarter of the way," Robin replies, before turning to you. "What did you want?"

"IT BELATEDLY OCCURS TO ME THAT I KNOW HOW TO CAST THE SPELL OF FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT," you admit.

Briar facepalms.

"...and that is?" the smith asks.

"General-purpose 'let go of me' spell," the little fairy explains to her brother. "The target can't be slowed, held, restrained, or immobilized by anything short of a full set of locked chains and manacles. It works against water resistance, too."

Robin considers this. "That sounds like it would have been really useful to have cast before we started mining," he notes mildly.

"YES, AND I APOLOGIZE FOR THAT MEMORY LAPSE, BUT GIVE ME A BREAK, HERE. IT'S NOT LIKE PHENOMENAL MAGICAL POWER COMES WITH AN INSTRUCTION MANUAL, YOU KNOW."

"What's an instru-"

"NEVER/mind," you and Briar chorus.

You quickly cast the spell, adding a little mana so that you can affect Robin as well. This exceeds the limits of your ability to suppress the magic, but with the effects constrained to your persons and the bulk of the river as a screen, it should be fine.

Once the magic has settled in, you fetch Robin's larger mining tools from where they've been resting on the shore under Briar's watchful eye, and then return to the bottom of the river. Along the way, you note that even the weight of Robin's Copper Boots is apparently being mitigated by your magic. Not reduced - each of his footsteps is still kicking up a cloud of silt and other detritus from the riverbed - but the smith is moving along much faster than before, unhindered by the heavy weights strapped to his feet or the resistance of the river itself.

When the two of you start mining this time-

*WHOOSH*
*TING*
*WHOOSH*
*PING*

-the Spell of Freedom of Movement rapidly proves its worth. You pull almost as much ore out of the moonsilver deposit in the next half-hour as you did in the hour and a half before that, and as much again by the time your Zora-form and physical enhancement spells are starting to run down. A brief pause to fall back and renew your spells, and you've soon dug out enough moonsilver to suit Robin's needs.

Gained Club Training D (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Mining E (Plus)
Gained Pick Training F (Plus) (Plus)

You looked around for the river-fish a few times during your renewed burst of productivity, but they disappeared at some point, having either drawn out all potential hilarity from your actions, or gotten distracted by something else.

When you emerge from the river again, it's been the better part of six hours since you started the day's trip to Faerie, and you are understandably hungry.

You also figure out where the fish went; Briar has them formed up before her in three rows of four, and is waving her tiny wand and the color-shifting light at the end of it about like a conductor's baton. Each time the glow changes color, one of the fish opens its mouth and burbles a vaguely musical note:

"Gluuuug!"
"Glaaaag!"
"Gluuuug!"
"GLAAAA-GLUUUUG!"
"Glug-glug glug-glug glug-glug glug-glug glug!"

Gained Aquan F (Plus)
Gained Singing E

You join Robin in staring wordlessly at Briar and Her Musical Fish.

"What? You were down there for three hours! I got bored!"

The... chorus... of river-fish bob up and down in support of their new conductor.

Over your meal, you discuss your progress with Robin. With the sungold and moonsilver now taken care of, all that remains is the Goddess copper - but as the smith informs you, he's going to need more of that by far to build the Fairy Death Machine, more than he thinks you can harvest over the remainder of this day.

Working it out, if your current rate of productivity holds true, you're going to have to spend the rest of the day digging, and then either do an all-day mining marathon tomorrow or Sunday, or spread your efforts out over the weekend.

Your muscles ache just thinking about it, but you expect that the greater concern is the potential for one of those messengers Lady Chloe mentioned to turn up and notice a human (or rather, a non-Fae) puttering about pulling rocks from the ground in the Great Fairy's domain.

Before going to bed last night, you took the time to prepare a modest meal for two (one serving of fairy-sized portions, the other normal), which you packed away in your dimensional pocket. Once you've dried off, you take out a spare tablecloth that you brought along as well, spread it out over a dry patch of ground some distance back from the river, and start laying out the food.

Robin does likewise, producing several ceramic containers and metal utensils from his pouches, as well as a Glass Bottle of Milk that sweats in the midday heat, and another Bottle of some manner of Stew.

Briar sniffs at the air for a moment. "Oooh... I smell Summer's cooking!"

Smiling, Robin takes out a fairy-sized package.

"Score!"

You could almost feel cheated for how quickly Briar abandons your culinary efforts in favor of someone else's, but it IS her Biggest Sister's home cooking, which your partner hasn't truly had in decades. Not to mention, you're honestly tempted by the smell yourself. As one might expect of a forest-dwelling fairy, much of Robin's meal is greens, fruit, and nuts, but there's definitely some kind of cooked meat in there, as well as bread that seems to still be fresh from the oven - and when Robin opens the Bottle of Biggest Sister's Stew, ribbons of steam escape along with the tantalizing aroma of fish.

That'll be the influence of your Zora form, you expect. Or maybe it's just really good home cooking. Who can say?

You discuss options for how to handle the remaining mining over lunch, in between bites of sandwiches and the *glug glug glug* of Robin downing a mouthful of milk or stew.

Under different circumstances, you could just summon a troop of Goron miners and turn the problem over to them, but Summoning Magic is too likely to cause magical contamination. Any summoned creature is an ongoing magical effect, one whose mere presence involves bending space-time, and they have passive connections to their summoner besides. It was one thing to summon that celestial boar and send it to chase the almiraj; you kept the animal far enough from the sungold to not be an issue, and it ran far away and never came back. Summoned miners would be in constant close proximity to the ore deposits, and while you can minimize your own magical signature when performing the summons, there's nothing you could really do to suppress the links or the subsequent low-level distortion surrounding them.

Besides, Robin didn't bring that many tools with him, and summoned tools would have the same problem as summoned miners.

That said, you do have one potential source of assistance that wouldn't risk any issues. With that in mind, you ask Briar if she'd be willing to "biggen up" and lend a hand to your efforts.

"If you'd asked me that this morning, I would have laughed at you," your partner replies. "But after getting bored enough to teach fish to sing, I'm willing to try almost anything."

Really? In that case, would she be willing to share some of her fo-

"MINE."

-ooor not.

If you can't magically call up an army of miners to ease your task, one thing you CAN do is figure out if you're risking a run-in with that Fae emissary over the next couple of days - and if so, when.

As such, once you've finished your meal, wiped your mouth, and packed away the containers and garbage, you cast the Spell of Divination, asking a simple question of the Goddesses:

"Will an emissary of the Fae Lord who claims the local sungold enter Lady Chloe's domain today, tomorrow, or on Sunday?"

And the answer comes back: "Saturday."

With that, tomorrow's mining trip is officially cancelled.

With nothing else that needs doing, you teleport your group to the nearest deposit of Goddess copper, and cast an extended-duration Spell to Alter One's Self on Briar to boost her to human size. She grabs one of her brother's spare mining tools, and the three of you set to work, gradually working out how to get the maximum results from your combined efforts.

And, of course, singing.

Gained Geology F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Pick Training F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)

You spend the next four hours and change like that. When your Zora-form starts to waver about an hour and a half on, you return to your Goron state, and when you replenish the Spell of Augmentation shortly thereafter, you naturally include Briar. You could have simply extended these spells to last all day when you first cast them, but you've been trying to exercise your mana reserve again; unfortunately, you have a fair idea of how much effort that takes now, and you don't think you're going to cross the critical threshold today.

One of the drawbacks of having an overabundance of mana, you suppose. Poor you.

Likely because the node of Goddess copper is located in part of the forest that wasn't recently terrorized by a psychopath, there are a few points in the afternoon where you sense that you're being watched by one of the locals. You try to catch a glimpse of the party responsible each time, but see little more than shaking bushes and branches. Once, you spot a winged spider sitting at ease on the side of a tree, but he - or she - doesn't call out or move to approach you, and you return the gesture of minding your own business.

Dinnertime rolls around without incident, and your party breaks for a second meal. Both you and Robin - and Summer - were farsighted enough to pack for two meals, although neither of you accounted for Briar being human-sized at the time.

You are careful not to let it sound like you're casting aspersions on Biggest Sister's judgment. She, at least, has the excuse of being unfamiliar with Briar's partner-granted ability to take on such a form.

"Do you want me to mention this" - Robin gestures at Briar's, well, everything - "to her for the day after tomorrow?"

"Please do," Briar replies, before willing herself back to normal fairy proportions.

You're just about to dig in when you hear a somewhat familiar and not-too-distant howl.

"Wolf?" Robin asks, re-sealing the half-empty Bottle of Stew he just unstoppered, and reaching for his mining hammer.

"I think it's Ulfr, actually," you reply, even as you set your own food down and draw your sword from your pocket. In passing, you note that your Goron-sized form can wield the blade one-handed.

Moments pass, and then a huge mostly-black wolf with white undersides and golden eyes emerges from the forest, one dark-haired catgirl riding on his back.

Cat beams, and as her friend-slash-mount comes to a stop at a polite distance, she calls out. "Friends! Bring more meat and bones?"

Ulfr licks his lips eagerly.

Robin sends a suddenly wary glance at you and Briar.

"I DID NOT," you reply, "BUT IF YOU'D BE WILLING TO WAIT A FEW MINUTES, I COULD CONJURE SOME."

Cat's eyes narrow intently. "For?"

"WE'VE SPENT MOST OF THE DAY MINING," you explain, gesturing at Robin and Briar, "AND WE HAVE SEVERAL HOURS OF WORK YET TO GO, PLUS MORE IN A COUPLE OF DAYS' TIME."

Cat frowns. "Meat was good..."

Ulfr whines.

"Bones, too," she adds. "Still, rocks boring. And one meal? Stingy."

"I COULD, PERHAPS, BE CONVINCED TO PROVIDE MEALS FOR THE DAY," you reply. "BUT THOSE WHO DO NOT WORK, DO NOT EAT."

Ulfr slumps slightly, whines, and paws at the earth.

"Ulfr not good with rocks," Cat says.

"We could use a guard while we work," Robin suggests.

Black ears perk up, and a great black and white tail wags hopefully.

Now Cat looks suspicious. "Digging where?"

"It'll depend on how much ore we can get out of the deposits in question," Robin answers her, before nodding at the nearby mound of picked-at stone. "I figure we'll exhaust the easily available stuff here before day's end, but if the other sites are as rich, we shouldn't need to visit more than two of them."

You review the locations of the Goddess copper deposits that Robin identified as useful sources for Project Fairy Death Machine. Since you've been warned that an emissary from a Fae court (little-c emphasized) will be in the area tomorrow, you figure it wouldn't be a bad idea to avoid Lord Raka's vicinity the day after that, just in case. As such, you pick out the two sites farthest from the Great Tree, and describe their locations to Cat, then do the same with the next three spots, just in case. You can't be sure you won't need to visit some of them, and you don't want to be accused of trying to alter the deal.

No disrespect to Lord Vader, but that kind of thing doesn't end well when the other party in the agreement is Fae.

The catgirl nods slowly, finding nothing objectionable in the sites you list off-

"Avoiding Great Fairy good." She shivers.

You swear you can almost hear a cry of pain in the distance.

-and then asks another pertinent question: "Hours?"

"WE STARTED ABOUT AN HOUR AFTER SUNRISE, GIVE OR TAKE."

This time, it's Cat who whimpers. "So early?"

"WE NEED A LOT OF ORE, AND IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA TO GET IT OUT OF THE WAY AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE."

"But early?"

...you're getting the impression Cat may not be a morning person.

"I COULD PROVIDE BREAKFAST AS WELL?" you offer.

That earns an uncertain grimace and unhappy yowl.

Ulfr's eyes roll up towards his friend-slash-passenger, and he barks once, softly.

"...traitor," Cat huffs. "Fine. Four meals for us, for one evening and one day of work. Meat? Bones?"

You could do that, at least for Sunday's meals, but...

"WOULD YOU PREFER BOAR, OR FISH?"

Cat freezes. "What?"

"I CAN PROVIDE EITHER."

"Fish!"

Ulfr barks.

"Fish for me, boar and bones for Ulfr," Cat corrects herself.

You nod. "FOUR MEALS FOR BOTH OF YOU, IN RETURN FOR ONE EVENING AND ONE DAY OF WORK, CAT MINING, ULFR GUARDING. DO WE HAVE A DEAL?"

Cat looks down at Ulfr.

Ulfr looks up at Cat.

"We do."

"Woof."

Gained Haggling C

"THEN I SHALL BEGIN."

Ten minutes of casting later, a long table and four chairs appear, along with a heap of fine pillows. The table does not actually groan under the weight of food covering it - unlike that time with the boggards and the mobogo, you scaled the Heroes' Feast down a bit so as not to be wasteful - but there's still quite a bit to be had. The promised fish, huge wolf-sized servings of boar meat, and extra-large bones take up a fair chunk of the tabletop, but there's plenty of space left over for the soups (three varieties), salads (vegetable and fruit), drinks (milk, water, and apple, orange, and grape juices), a basket of breadrolls (with butter and jam at the ready), a tray of hard-boiled eggs (shelled, decoratively sliced, seasoned, and with toothpicks), and more.

The locals' eyes widen. "Oooo..."

Cat and Ulfr dig in with such eagerness that you're half-tempted to make a remark about starving wolves. You refrain, however, for several reasons.

One, you're not sure that either of them would get the reference.

Two, the idea of starvation is likely a lot less funny for people who have to hunt for their food on a daily basis.

Three, they might take it literally, and try to explain that neither of them is starving, and also that Cat isn't a wolf.

Four, that might be racist. Speciesist. Bigoted, there we go.

Being able to read your audience and anticipate their interests is part of having a good sense of humor.

As the two locals chow down, the rest of you get on with enjoying your own helpings of the feast. Briar and Robin both polish off the remainder of Summer's cooking first, however, which you figure is only fair; magical feasts are all well and good, but they're not home cooked meals made by somebody who loves you and knows your tastes.

Once they're finished their "first servings," the fairies prove to have plenty of room left over for the "main course." After you've spotted Briar another casting of Alter Self, anyway.

It takes the better part of a quarter-hour for Cat and Ulfr to slow down and actually start to taste their meals rather than simply inhale them, but they do so. You give them a few minutes more to get used to the idea that they can take the time to enjoy the feast - indeed, given the multiple courses available, they have to - before you start talking.

"SO, CAT. HAVE YOU EVER BEEN MINING BEFORE?"

Mouth full of fish, she shakes her head and makes a negative sound.

"WELL, AS IT HAPPENS, I KNOW A SPELL THAT WOULD GRANT YOU TEMPORARY FAMILIARITY WITH ONE OF THE TOOLS INVOLVED. IF YOU'RE INTERESTED, I COULD CAST THAT SPELL ON YOU WHEN WE GET STARTED, OR ONE OF US" -you gesture at yourself and the fairies- "CAN DEMONSTRATE, AND WALK YOU THROUGH IT WITHOUT MAGICAL ASSISTANCE."

Cat considers that, then shakes her head again and swallows her food. "No spell."

Ulfr makes a sound.

Cat huffs, and adds, "Thank you for offer."

Ulfr nods, appeased.

"NOT A PROBLEM. ALSO, DO YOU HAPPEN TO HAVE ANY TOUGHER GEAR?"

Feline and canine regard you curiously.

"WE'RE NOT GOING UNDERGROUND OR ANYTHING, BUT PICKING AND HAMMERING AT AN OPEN ORE DEPOSIT CAN STILL BE A BIT... ROCKY."

Cat snickers.

Briar sighs.

Ulfr groans.

Robin forebears to comment.

Gained Sylvan C (Plus)

"ANYWAY, THERE'S A REASON WHY ROBIN'S WEARING METAL-TOED BOOTS AND REINFORCED GLOVES, AND I TURNED INTO A BIG ROCK-PERSON."

"Wondered," Cat admits, sparing you a glance. Then she looks at Briar, who is wearing a scaled-up version of her usual dress.

"I sat out the morning," your partner admits. "As for the rest, I borrowed a pair of boots from my brother, here-"

And may you just say that the sight of a fairy tromping around in heavy Copper Boots is bizarre? Because it is.

"-and my hands are probably going to be sore enough to need a shot of magical healing when this is all over." Briar finishes off with a sour glance at her hands.

"I'll bring a spare pair of gloves next time," Robin assures her.

"Better boots, too?"

"Don't press your luck."

"Pleeeeaaaase, Biggest Brother?"

"Stop looking at me like that."

Cat, meanwhile, looks down at her own limbs with some uncertainty. She's got a pair of leather gloves on, fingerless to accommodate her not-quite-claws and perhaps for a more precise grip; while not ideal for the task to come, they will at least offer her palms some protection against chafing, and maybe absorb a bit of the shock of striking stone. Her footwear, on the other hand, is basically a pair of sandals.

You see the catgirl flex her clawed toes, the mask of uncertainty growing to an expression of concern.

"I COULD TRANSMUTE THOSE INTO SOMETHING MORE APPROPRIATE," you offer.

Conjuring replacement equipment is kind of off the table; after resisting that earlier impulse to part the waters that were slowing your work on the moonsilver, it'd be kind of sad to just go ahead and mess up one of the much more accessible Goddess copper deposits. But you've been using Transformation Magic on yourself to no ill effect, and while you don't have a spell specifically to turn one item into another, you've played around with polymorph spells often enough (including today, even) that you think you can manage it. Plus, Robin's (normal) boots are right there to serve as a template.

Once again, Cat considers your offer of magical assistance. With a final flex of her feet, she says, "Please. And thank you."

For the remaining half-hour or so of the Heroes' Feast, you keep up the conversation, steering more towards questions about Cat and Ulfr - albeit in a general sense, so as not to come off like you're prying. You ask what it's like to live in this part of Faerie, if they've ever been elsewhere, what sort of things there are to do for fun, and so on.

As you expected, Cat is evasive about certain subjects, like where exactly she came from or where she and Ulfr call home, and her replies tend to be short, in simple words, and full of broken grammar. Despite that, she seems pleased to talk about other things, like how she and Ulfr first met-

"Still say was my stag," Cat grumbles, eyeing her companion sourly.

Ulfr snorts.

-her favorite places to hang out-

"Fiiiissssh."

-and amusing things she has seen or experienced.

You gradually piece together that, at some point when she was "still small," Cat wandered between domains and the unclaimed parts of Faerie that bordered them. She describes past territories as "boring," "scary," "hungry," and various other adjectives that give at least some explanation for why she moved on. Chloe's realm, in comparison is, "nice, friendly... sometimes too much."

Judging from the description of the hunt that introduced them to each other, Ulfr has been with the young catgirl for quite some time. Wolves are pack animals, you know, and this one is intelligent enough to have grasped the advantages of a hunting partner who could take down prey from a distance. Cat seems very proud of how she "convinced" Ulfr to "team up" with her, but from the wolf's amused expression and certain behaviors - like that chiding whine about her manners, earlier, and how he nudges a plate of vegetables towards her now - you suspect Ulfr may have had motives Cat hasn't considered, as well as a somewhat different opinion of their relationship dynamic.

It's not exactly paternal or fraternal, but there are definite elements of both.

Gained King of Beasts C (Plus)

After an hour or so - during which you subtly renew your Goron guise - everyone has eaten their fill, and you are lingering over one last drink and a last slice of the still-warm milk cake that was hidden under the lid of one half-buried serving tray. Cat took one wary bite and pretty much fell in love.

"Sweet! Warm! Good!"

As the magic of the Feast fully takes hold, you consider the leftovers, which are, despite your efforts to tailor the spell to the number of diners, not inconsequential. And while it is just conjured food and will disappear in due course, it does prick at your conscience a bit to just "trash" such good eats.

Fortunately, there is a solution. You haven't exactly ignored the minor Fae that have been showing up in their twos and threes and tiny tens since your party (plus two) sat down to eat. A small army of brightly colored birds, giant insects, fairies, surface-dwelling animals, and more besides is now gathered at the edges of clearing, eyeing the remains of your meal with obvious intent.

"WHO'S UP FOR A SHORT WALK TO AID THE DIGESTION BEFORE WE GET TO WORK?" you offer.

"Don't wanna," Briar sighs. "Too full."

"Same," Cat groans contentedly.

Ulfr, however, is getting up from his pile of pillows to nudge at his partner - and when that doesn't work, he deploys the tongue.

"Ack! Ulfr, no! Company!"

The wolf is without pity or mercy.

You glance from them over to Briar, who looks from you to her brother - who has mirrored your own actions.

"On second thought, yeah, sure, you betcha."

It's an open question as to whether Cat actually gets up from her chair or falls off it in the process of fleeing from Ulfr. Briar takes a more graceful exit, and Robin follows suit, pausing only to gather up the tools he left laying on the side of the table.

As the rest of your expanded party move off, you linger behind for a moment, and look around at the dozens of minor Fae that have gathered not-too-nearby.

With a sweeping, two-handed gesture at the table and what food remains on it, you say, "HELP YOURSELVES."

You get about five steps away when there is a single chitter, perhaps of an oversized squirrel.

Then all is a scramble of paws, a soft thunder of flapping wings, and a chorus of hungry cries ranging from animal to avian to insect to who knows what.

"Free food!"

"Outta the way!"

"Give me strawberries or give me death!"

"That fish is mine!"

"Bug, I will eat you!"

"Not if I eat you first!"

"Omnomnomnom!"

You make a point of not looking back at the feeding frenzy, fearing that you might be expected to do something about it.

Catching up with the others - and when Briar starts to glance your way, quickly gesturing for her not to let her gaze shift past you - you engage Robin in conversation about some of the reagents you have burning the proverbial hole in your pocket.

It quickly becomes apparent that the smith's knowledge of magical materials is not so broad as you might have hoped. If it has to do with fairies or the Lost Woods, he might as well be a master, but for things acquired via the wider family of Fae or the greater Kingdom of Hyrule, Robin's information is more limited; and once you get onto items sourced from Earth, he can't really tell you anything you don't already know.

He is able to give you some ideas of what you could do with that Bottle of Gleeok Blood, though. Demonic mutant or no, a dragon is still a dragon, and dragon's blood is pretty potent stuff, especially in the hands of the one who "acquired" it. Granted, your experiments have already led you to conclude that this particular Bottle of Blood is only going to be good for strictly short-term uses, but that still leaves a few possibilities open - and who knows? You might run into a genuine Gleeok some day.

Updated Gleeok Blood

The conversation gradually comes around to a related topic, namely the jewelry for Kahlua that you've been vaguely considering commissioning Robin to craft for you.

Almost immediately, the burly fairy cautions you that he doesn't work with gemstones. The settings for them, yes, sometimes, but given the choice, he prefers to leave even that much to the experts, along with the whole business of cutting and polishing.

"NOT ENOUGH GEMS IN THE LOST WOODS TO MAKE IT A WORTHWHILE SIDELINE?" you venture.

"Not really," Robin readily admits. "Just getting ahold of enough ore to do my regular work is hard enough."

"CASE IN POINT," you say, gesturing around.

"This IS a bit of an unusual example for the sheer amount of material involved, but aside from that? Yeah, pretty much."

Robin adds that, on the rare occasions he has needed to account for gemstones in one of his projects, he's outsourced to a particular Zora family - three generations of them, now, father to son to granddaughter - who've consistently demonstrated good eyes and steady hands for the work.

"NOT GORONS?" you rumble.

"Gorons tend to be better at mining gems than they are at cutting them," comes the answer. "They can separate most types of raw mineral crystal from stone well enough, or cleave large crystals down to sizes that are more manageable for us smaller people, but most Gorons have too much strength and enthusiasm and not quite enough manual dexterity to be any good at working gems. Especially not at the sizes most people want them in; big hands aren't much help for really small work, you know?"

You glance down at your hand, flex the heavy fingers, and admit that yeah, you DO know. Then you get back on track.

It quickly comes to a question of what, exactly, you're thinking of getting Kahlua. Rings are right out; there are implications and expectations there that are just better left alone, and they wouldn't fit well underneath the Warrior Princess Gauntlets anyway. Given Kahlua wears a couple of power seals as earrings, you can rule those out as well, and bracelets can be crossed off the list, too, as they'd clash with the Warrior Princess Bracers. That leaves a necklace, a tiara, one of those bands worn around the upper arm, or some kind of hairclip. Maybe an anklet?

There's also the matter of whether you want to stick with unadorned metalwork, or order a bit of proper jewelry. Robin would have to outsource that, which would add time and cost, and Kahlua's next birthday is only three weeks away. Depending on how busy these Zora lapidaries are and what stones they have available, there may not be enough time for them to finish a custom order and get it to you - especially not if you mean to enchant it.

Alternately, you could just forget the idea. You did already give Kahlua a gift at your birthday, along with that general announcement that the reverse-birthday presents were likely to account for your gifts to others this year, due to all the other demands on your resources.

In the end, you decide not to place an order with Robin at this time. You might have decided otherwise, if Kahlua's birthday wasn't so close, or you weren't so strapped for free time and could spare a week or so for enchanting work - or if you hadn't already given her an early birthday present. As things stand, though, you think you're good.

Besides, you have a certain theme going with your birthday presents to Kahlua, and it would lose the impact if you started outsourcing the work, instead of making them yourself from the bodies of your defeated enemies.

Also, it's not like you can't make a deal with Robin in the future, when things on your end have calmed down a bit.

By this point, you've made a complete circuit of the clearing, and the ruckus from the table has died down to the occasional clink of cutlery. Glancing cautiously in that direction, you find that most of the forest critters have disappeared, leaving a couple of birds and something that looks like a raccoon to pick over the last remnants of the meal.

Hopefully none of the dine-and-dashers got eaten themselves, but you're not going to inquire too closely on the matter.

In any case, it seems like it's time to get back to work.

While Robin hands his Copper Boots off to Briar again, you demonstrate the basics of using a mining pick and hammer for Cat. Not that you're anything more than a novice yourself, but the movements are easy enough to get down.

Gained Pick Training E

Then, while Cat is handling the tools and getting a better idea of their weight and balance, you turn your attention to the matter of getting her some proper footwear.

As you noted earlier, you don't know any spells meant specifically to transform a person's clothing, but shapechanging spells in general do provide some clues as to how it would be done - and also how it wouldn't. The Spell to Alter One's Self, for example, adjusts the size and shape of whatever you're wearing at the time, so that they'll fit the new body, whereas most of the greater spells of the sub-school of polymorphing simply absorb equipment meant for humanoids into forms that can't really wear them.

On that note, you took your shoes off and tucked them into your dimensional pocket before going Goron the first time today. Size thirty sneakers would have been very odd, and a dead giveaway as to your real origins besides.

By the time Cat has decided to try out the pick, you've got a formula together, and start chanting.

A few minutes later, Cat yowls uneasily as your magic washes over her feet, turning her open-toed sandals into copper-toed leather boots, with socks peering out of the top. You're not entirely sure if the literally cat-footed girl needs them or not, but you're assuming such.

"Uncomfortable," she complains, shifting about.

"ARE THEY TOO TIGHT, OR TOO LOOSE?"

"No," Cat reluctantly admits. "Just... strange."

"LET US KNOW IF THAT CHANGES."

After that, you re-cast the Spell of Augmentation you've been using all day, including Cat in the effect after explaining the magic and getting her agreement.

With that done, you all get to work. It takes a bit of time to sort out how four people - one of them markedly larger than the rest, and only one with real experience at this sort of work - can best dig away at a single deposit of ore, but after a while you get the spacing and timing sorted out and have a decent rhythm going.

Cat picks up the Goron mining song pretty quickly, too. You wonder if that's a Fae thing, a cat thing, or a personal talent?

Gained Geology E
Gained Mining E (Plus) (Plus)

Once you hit your stride, you keep working steadily for the better part of two hours. Cat keeps up the whole time without complaining, although you do notice her shifting her shoulders a few times, muscles complaining about unfamiliar work. Briar exhibits similar reactions. Ulfr wanders in and out of your field of vision a few times over the course of the dig, sometimes walking a circuit of the clearing, others sitting on his haunches. Once, he gets up and barks warningly at something in the trees, which gets everyone's attention.

Cat promptly wrinkles her nose. "Squirrel."

Something chitters in the forest.

"DANGEROUS?"

"Annoying."

The chitter repeats, sounding amused.

"Tasty," Cat adds, to a sudden silence, "but annoying." The catgirl deliberately turns her back on the noise. "Ignore."

As the hammering and picking resume, you catch sight of a fluffy tail big enough to make a coat out of whipping about as its owner turns and scurries deeper into the trees.

What finally ends the work is your Transformation Spell winding down. You briefly consider renewing the magic, but then you consult your internal clock and realize that it's coming up on eight in the evening, and you really ought to be getting home.

None of your mining partners really object to this. Robin's got a good load of ore from the day's efforts, and you've been pulling up bare stone more often than not for a while now anyway.

"Day after tomorrow?" Cat asks, as Robin takes back his tools.

"DAY AFTER TOMORROW," you confirm.

Idly, you wonder if you should invite Cat and Ulfr to meet Navi before the day's end. If they were willing to let you teleport them, you could get everyone to the trilithon without issue, and if not, it's not too far for a run - or a short flight, as the case may be. On the other hand, considering how wary she is of Chloe, Cat might be happier not to meet another Great Fairy.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?

"BEFORE THE TWO OF YOU LEAVE," you say to Cat and Ulfr, "WOULD YOU CARE TO ACCOMPANY US TO MEET BRIAR AND ROBIN'S MOTHER?"

Cat suddenly looks wary. "Um..."

"IF IT HELPS, SHE'S NOT THE HUGGING SORT-"

Slitted eyes suddenly widen, ears and tail going *TOING* in matching surprise, but it's the embarrassed flush covering Cat's face that draws the most attention.

"How?!"

...ah. Right, she never actually told you why she was spooked by Lady Chloe, did she? You learned that from the fairies, who also mentioned that Cat wasn't really afraid of their mother, just mortified by the Great Fairy's tendency towards hugging her, and her own inability to avoid it.

Thank you, compulsive honesty. There are times when you wonder why you even bother... at least until you remember Ganondorf's streak of compulsive DIShonesty, and your own resolution to avoid emulating the Thief-King's less-than-admirable qualities whenever practical.

You clear your throat. "THE LOCAL FAIRIES MAY HAVE SAID SOMETHING."

Cat's ears flatten. "Fairies..."

Briar shrugs. "Sorry, Cat, but chatty little airheads are going to gossip - and I say that as a former chatty little airhead."

You manfully resist an urge to take advantage of that broad opening-

"'Former'?" Robin wonders aloud.

-but Biggest Brother seems less restrained, or perhaps is just out of practice at dealing with Briar.

Considering how many OTHER little-but-not-TINY siblings you know he has, you don't think he's out of practice.

"Quiet, you," Briar growls at her brother. Turning back to the catgirl, she continues, "And Alex is right. Mom's not the type to hug people without their permission, especially not at first meetings."

"...maybe later," Cat says evasively.

You nod, figuring that's about as far as you can push her. "RIGHT, SO WE'LL SEE YOU SUNDAY MORNING, THEN?"

Cat leaps on the change of topic. "Yes! Yes. Day after tomorrow. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, for digging up rocks." Then the catgirl scrambles onto the back of her canine partner, looks around quickly, and adds a hasty, "Bye!" before urging Ulfr to take off.

The great wolf rolls his eyes at the behavior, but obliges his partner.

After the two of them have disappeared into the trees, you check to make sure Robin has all his stuff - he does - and lay one hand on his shoulder while shaping the mana for a relatively short-range teleport. Briar lands on your shoulder opposite her brother, and then-

!

-you're back at the trilithon, where Navi is already waiting.

"That girl seems downright scared of Great Fairies," she muses. "What the heck has Chloe been doing, to make her react like that?"

"HUGGING HER, APPARENTLY."

Navi just shakes her head, and then turns to Robin. "So, did you have a productive day?"

Robin nods. "I'm all set as far as sungold and moonsilver go. We'll need to come back the day after tomorrow to try for the remaining Goddess copper, though."

"Why not tomorrow?"

"LADY CHLOE WILL BE RECEIVING A RATHER UNWELCOME VISITOR," you say, before explaining that situation.

"Ugh, court politics." Navi shakes her head. "And Chloe wonders why all of us in Hyrule choose to stay there..."

Navi returns you to the forest outside Sunnydale, and you make your way home from there, shedding your Goron disguise-
-after spending the last few minutes of it rolling.

"Welcome home, Alex," your father greets you from the living room, after you've let yourself in and kicked off your shoes. "Busy day in the mine?"

You did let your folks know what you were up to. It was safe enough that you didn't feel any reluctance to fill them in on the details, although you may not have been ENTIRELY clear on how dangerous Faerie can be, beyond "magical wilderness."

"IT WAS-" You stop, clear your throat, and soften your tone before continuing. "I mean, it wasn't too bad, once I got into the swing of things."

Your dad chuckles at the bad pun.

"You spent all day digging up rocks?" Zelda asks with some confusion, as well as clear disapproval that you picked rocks over her.

Seeing as how it's almost time for your little sister to go to bed, you decide to spin the events of your day into a bedtime story of Adventure and Wonder for her, emphasizing the parts with the fairies and the Fae animals.

Saturday passes quiet- okay, make that unevent- make that, without anything bad happening. Despite your masterful storytelling the night before, Zelda clearly hasn't forgiven you for abandoning her to go digging, and insists that you spend time with her. It's something of a relief when she takes her afternoon nap, worn down by a busy morning of "kung fu practice," and more so when she wakes up and appears to decide that you're forgiven.

Though only after dragging you into a tea party.

Around the time spent with Zelda, you get in some reading, forging through several chapters of Magic of the Smithy. It felt appropriate, considering your work with Robin the day before and the day to come.

You also confirm your suspicions about your magic expenditure on Friday; you did, indeed, NOT burn enough mana to strengthen your reserves. Then again, you had enough gas left in the tank to return to more or less full power after a good night's sleep under your Restful Blanket, so, silver linings. Or maybe that should be "cotton"...?

Come Sunday, is there anything else you mean to do besides spend the day mining Goddess copper?

The woods around Sunnydale aren't nearly as primal as the Fae forest you just left, so it ought to be somewhat easier to maneuver your Goron-ified self about. Then, too, there's the possibility of testing out this form of locomotion on the road, or at least the gravel by the side of it - though that depends entirely on whether or not you see or hear any cars coming. There isn't a huge amount of traffic in Sunnydale proper at this time of the evening, but you aren't as familiar with conditions out this way...

Well, you'll figure it out.

Once again, you bend forward, tuck yourself into a fair approximation of a ball, and kick off into a roll.

As you'd hoped, this forest - thinned out by its proximity to human civilization, growth somewhat stunted by the emanations of the Hellmouth, and worn down further by human thoughtlessness and demonic malice - proves less difficult to pass through, even with your massive "footprint" and unfamiliarity with rolling about. When you near the road, you pause, listening intently and uncurling a bit to look up and down the street, but as far as you can tell, there's no other traffic in the area.

And so, with a grinding of loose stones, you make your way up onto the tarmac, aim for home, and start spinning.

The relatively flat surface of the road proves helpful to getting a good spin and speed going, as does the hardness of the material.

"Left! Left!" Briar cries urgently.

Staying in the right lane, on the other hand?

"Your other left, Alex!"

That's somewhat harder.

Gained Driving F
Gained Rolling F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)

And then a car comes around a corner, moving slowly enough that the low hum of its well-tuned engine didn't reach you over the disorientation and constant *rumblerumblerumble* of your own movement. You're both in your own lanes, so that's fine, but-

*SCREECH*

-the other guy clearly wasn't expecting to see a six-foot-wide boulder trundling down the road tonight.

You want to get the mining over with as soon as is practical, and the best way to do that is to keep your head down and limit your movements to teleporting between ore deposits. You've already checked in with Lady Chloe about the mining and recent events; there's no need to do so twice, and there's no one else in her domain that you really need to talk with.

Besides, for all you know, that Fae emissary might still be hanging around Raka's neck of the woods on Sunday. Best not to go borrowing trouble.

Since you promised Cat and Ulfr a few conjured feasts, you don't bother to pack yourself a lunch on Saturday evening, and you keep "breakfast" light: a couple pieces of toast; a glass of apple juice; and a banana for the road - so to speak.

Given what happened on Friday night, you teleport to your pick-up spot, which is out in the desert this time.

Also reflecting lessons learned the other day, when you fire off a Sending to Navi, she's already wide awake, and her glowing not-really-there presence appears before you nigh instantly, whisking your once-again Goronized self and Briar off to Faerie. Robin's there when you arrive, but Cat and Ulfr have yet to appear.

"We didn't agree on exactly WHERE to meet them, did we?" Briar notes absently.

"WE DID NOT," you admit.

"What do you think? Should we set up breakfast and try to lure 'em in by scent, or should we just head to the next digging site and lay out the spread there?"

Either could work, you suppose. It really depends on just how scared of Great Fairies Cat actually is, and whether she's hungry enough for her stomach to override her head. Or if Ulfr is.

On a related note, what sort of food are you going to provide for the day's meals? It takes a full hour to finish a Heroes' Feast, which is a fair investment of time, and the effects of one such meal last for quite a long time - long enough that if you one for breakfast, it wouldn't have worn off by dinnertime, unless you ate rather later than you're used to doing. And as with so many other spells, the magical effects of multiple Feasts don't stack. You also didn't specifically promise Cat and Ulfr four Feasts, just four meals, so technically, you could cast Create Food and Drink three times today and be done with it. Though that strikes you as being a bit stingy...

Although you are concerned about the driver of that car, you figure the best thing you can do for them is to be on your way with all speed. If they're not in the know about Sunnydale's nightlife, the sight of a huge rock unfolding into a massively built rock-person would almost certainly freak them out, no matter how friendly you tried to act. And a freaked-out person really should not be behind the wheel of any sort of vehicle.

Conversely, if the driver IS aware of the things that go bump, crash, ow in the night... well, a twilight meeting with a rock-person only recognizable to a handful of people on Earth (none of whom are here) probably wouldn't go over any better.

With that in mind, you stick to your side of the road and make like a rolling stone.

*Rumblerumblerumble*

"ARE THEY STILL THERE?" you ask Briar after a bit.

"The taillights haven't moved-" your partner shouts back.

*SCREEEECH*
*VRRRRoooom...*

"-wait, there they go."

Wincing at the scream of burning rubber and the Doppler-shifting roar of the engine, you offer up a silent prayer to the Goddesses that vehicle and its occupant(s) get home in good order.

Gained Driving F (Plus)
Gained Rolling E

If nothing else, there are no reports of any accidents along that road the next day.

"COULD I INTEREST YOU IN BREAKFAST, LADY NAVI?"

"I could eat," the Great Fairy admits. A moment later, the glowing nimbus of her awareness coalesces into physical presence. "Are you sure your other guest won't be upset having me here?"

"POSSIBLY A BIT, BUT CAT NEEDS TO GET OVER HER FEAR OF BEING HUGGED AGAINST HER WILL BY GREAT FAIRIES-"

"Terrible affliction that it is," Navi murmurs.

"-AND SITTING DOWN TO A MEAL WITH A GREAT FAIRY WHO *DOESN'T* TRY TO HUG HER SEEMS LIKE IT WOULD BE A GOOD WAY TO START WORKING ON THAT."

"Or it could make her paranoid that Mom's plotting to hug her the instant she lets her guard down," Briar points out.

"AH, BUT PARTAKING OF A HEROES' FEAST MAKES ONE MORE RESISTANT TO FEAR," you remind your partner.

"...clever boy," Briar admits.

You spot your partner another casting of the Spell to Alter One's Self, extending the duration to the point where the magic ought to last most of the day. That done, you cast the Spell of the Heroes' Feast, reducing the mana cost slightly by decreasing the maximum number of diners the feasting table can accommodate - which, at your current level of ability, happens to be almost exactly enough to feed one human boy-turned-Goron, three human-sized fairies, a Fae catgirl, and one larger-than-mortal-life Fae wolf.

While the contents differ somewhat, the breakfast spread is no less lavish than the dinner one was on Friday: pancakes and waffles with maple syrup, fresh butter, and an assortment of jams and jellies; breakfast rolls and whole-grain cereals; bacon, sausages (both flat and round varieties), and a few whole hams (Ulfr will probably scarf down two or three of those all by himself), along with a modest order of fish for Cat; bowls and platters of whole fruits (apples, oranges, bananas, and berries of black, blue, and straw) rather than sliced-up salads; a largely unchanged selection of beverages; and of course, more bones for the wolf to gnaw.

As Navi, Robin, and Briar start filling their plates, you begin one more casting, setting up a Spell of Sending to alert Cat to your arrival and the readiness of breakfast.

As you perform the ritual, you absently reflect that there must be a quicker way to contact people who are on the same plane of existence as you, yet too far away for a Message Spell to be reliable.

Pushing that thought aside, you complete the spell and speak: "CAT, ULFR, THIS IS ALEX. BREAKFAST IS SERVED AT THE TRILITHON. DON'T PANIC; LADY NAVI WILL BE JOINING US. ONCE AGAIN, SHE ISN'T A HUGGER."

With that, you send off the message and turn to fetch a plate for yourself.

You've pilled up three pancakes and a generous mix of bacon and sausages when the winds of magic carry Cat's reply back to you.

"Ugh, too early- breakfast! Ulfr, we- wait, FAIRY?! Urrr... maybe go back to- ack! Ulfr! Put down! Put down now! Ulfr? ULFR! Not faiiiirrrr!"

That yowl of protest trails off, and then the message ends.

Good wolf, you suppose?

As you finish serving yourself your first course, you consider how to handle lunch and dinner.

You figure that losing the benefits of a Heroes' Feast for the last couple of hours of the day is an acceptable trade-off to NOT losing two hours of work. The savings in mana and spiritual energy are a minor consideration in comparison, as you've got plenty of both to burn.

With the feeding arrangements decided on, you focus on the meal before you.

Six or seven minutes after your Sending ended, Ulfr trots into view, teeth clamped lightly but firmly on the back of Cat's vest. The visibly sulky catgirl hangs from her partner's mouth like an angry kitten being carted around by a parent, lifting her feet out of the way of any natural obstacles that threaten to bang against them.

You can hear the growl of offended feline pride just looking at her.

As with most clouds, this one brings a silver lining: Cat's annoyance at her partner seems to buffer her against Navi's presence. Once Ulfr sets her down, the catgirl stalks over to the table and begins grabbing food with a muttered "Morning," while hardly glancing at anyone - except Ulfr, who she hisses at as the wolf moves around the table to his waiting pile of cushions.

Ulfr ignores the grumpy cat in favor of flopping down and biting into a waiting hunk of ham.

The next fifteen minutes or so are on the quiet side, but breakfast conversation eventually resumes, threads of idle chatter weaving in and out of more practical points.

Robin mentions that he brought extra sets of work gloves, boots, and even hardhats for today, and a couple of additional tools besides. He actually had the hats in one of his pouches yesterday, the need for them just never came up.

It might today; one of the deposits you have marked for potential exploitation is spread out within a small cave, and falling debris could be a concern.

Cat eventually gets over her grouchiness enough to mention that a "stranger" was seen passing through the area yesterday. She didn't see them herself, having heard the story third- or fourth-hand, but apparently the "rider" came from the north, headed more or less directly to the site of the Great Raka Tree, and was seen again later, first making for the sungold deposit and then returning from it in haste.

When you ask what happened after that, Cat admits, "Not sure. Storm came; thunder, lightning. Everybody hid, nobody saw."

Now that you stop and think about it, the air of the forest DOES feel a little more damp today than on your previous visits.

Cat adds that the rider hasn't been seen since, though.

Navi frowns at the tale. "Maybe I'd better check in on Chloe after this..."

Cat flinches, though whether at the mention of Chloe's name or just the sound of Navi's voice, you're unsure.

"PLEASE DO."

You don't recall thunderbolts ever being associated with Great Fairies, but they're powerful enough that you wouldn't bet against them being able to manipulate lightning in some form. Plus, Chloe is native to Faerie, and might be a little different from her sisters in Hyrule.

For that matter, the storm might have been Raka's doing.

You're holding out hope that the storm wasn't the emissary's work, as a Fae powerful enough to alter the weather to reflect his displeasure with the banaan's untimely passing is a rather concerning prospect - not the least for what it would imply about the Lord that holds the messenger's loyalty.

One other point of discussion that comes up is which of the Goddess copper deposits you'll start the day's work at. Most of the ones that Robin identified as suitable are also relatively exposed to the elements, so yesterday's inclement weather might have left them a bit muddy. For that matter, it's not impossible that they got struck by lightning, which could have thrown off the balance of their energies enough to force you to dig elsewhere. Maybe. It would take some investigation to be sure.

That cave deposit, on the other hand, ought to be more or less dry, and was deep enough that you doubt it could be troubled by your average lightning strike. It could save you some hassle just going there and digging.

Also, are there any particular spells you wish to offer to your allies for today's work, or does the Spell of Augmentation you were using yesterday seem sufficient for your purposes?

As the BREAKFAST OF HEROES winds down, you state your preference to visit the only underground source of Goddess copper on your list, which you feel is the one least likely to have been turned into a muddy bog or struck by lightning as a result of yesterday's local storm.

"The lightning, yes," Robin agrees. "But whether or not it's wet inside the cave is going to depend on several factors, like the position of the cave mouth, the incline, the winds, and how much rain fell."

"Rain was short," Cat interjects, "but came down hard while it lasted."

That's a bit worrying, but all Robin says is that you'll have to wait and see when you get to the cave.

Once everyone has eaten their fill, Navi thanks you for the meal, excuses herself, and flies off towards Chloe and Raka's residence. The rest of you move a distance from the table-

"NOW ANNOUNCING FREE LEFTOVERS TO ANY TAKERS," you declare. "ALL MORSELS ARE FIRST COME, FIRST SERVED."

There is a pause before a mob of ravenous early risers explodes from the bushes and trees.

"Food! Glorious food!"

"MinemineminemineMINE!"

"You dirty bird! You ate my brother!"

"And I'll eat you, my pretty, and your little mite, too, if you get in my way! Bwahahahahaha!"

"Ohmnomnomnom!"

-and you once again strive to put the feeding frenzy out of your mind as you cast the Spell of Augmentation over your group of miners, while Robin hands out hats, gloves, and footwear to those who require them. Once all preparations are made, everyone forms a circle, and you cast the short-ranged Spell of Teleportation, conveying your five-person party to a spot just a couple of minutes' walk from the mouth of the copper cave.

As you reappear, the ground settles under your feet in a way that bespeaks damp soil giving under a Goron's weight. Despite this, you keep your thick fingers crossed that the interior of the cave is in better shape.

Before venturing towards the cave, you summon Shadow Alex to do a little reconnaissance. He pops out in Goron form as well, and the two of you trundle along together, arguing over details of the local geography to work out which of the remaining Goddess copper deposits he can visit without dragging the link between the two of you right over them.

Once he has a plan worked out, Shadow Alex teleports away, and you move to catch up with your associates, ground not-quite-squishing under each heavy step.

The area just outside the cave is as damp as your landing zone, if not more so, with puddles of rainwater built up here and there where the rockier ground proved resistant to seepage. Once you're a few steps inside, however, the surface gets tougher, drier, and more stable. There's a steady *drip* *drip* *drip* from somewhere deeper in, and every now and then a droplet leaks through the roof overhead to splash down on you or one of your companions, but on the whole, it seems dry enough not to be an issue for a bunch of newbie miners.

Ulfr finds a dry spot outside the mouth of the cave to keep the watch, and the rest of you get to work.

One discovery you soon make is that the sound of your voices echoing down the cave - which extends a good thirty or forty feet into the side of the hill - adds a certain something to your singing, almost like having another voice (or several of them) for the chorus. It takes some getting used to.

Shadow Alex returns perhaps twenty minutes later. Due to the relative positions of the cave and the other Goddess copper deposits that Robin cleared for use, he was only able to visit two without risking contamination. Both of those, he reports, are still somewhat damp despite having had a chance to dry off the previous afternoon and overnight; they're not quite to the point of what either of you would consider proper mud, but they're wet enough that digging in the area would be a little trickier than usual.

One of the deposits also got hit by lightning, and is still humming with the elemental energy. You mentally scratch that one off your list for the time being.

Shadow Alex and Shadow Briar take up position outside the mouth of the cave, freeing Ulfr up to patrol more widely. It's not long afterwards that you start hearing another echo of Briar's voice, this one coming down the cave to reach you, instead of rebounding up from the depths.

You keep your ears open for the possibility of another voice joining in, but you never hear it. Maybe the tools are just too loud?

Shaking your head, you refocus your attention on the digging.

A true Goron could probably keep this pace going for days at a time. You're not so hardy as all that, let alone as practiced, and even Robin doesn't hesitate to take a break every now and then. Cat and Briar do so more often, being less practiced at this sort of work and less well adapted to the environment, but keeping up without protest.

As for your own breaks, you...

...explore the depths of the cave. There's probably nothing down there, but you never know.

As you take a drink of conjured water, your dark Goron eyes drift towards the blackness at the rear of your little mine. You and your allies have been hammering, picking, and singing away for the better part of two hours without anything crawling up out of the subterranean depths to investigate the noise, which seems a fair indication that there's nothing down there to worry about.

But even so, you worry. You ARE in Faerie, where appearances can be deceiving, the laws of nature may shift at a moment's notice by the whim of a passing noble, and the very land itself is often alive.

...or maybe you're just letting your curiosity and paranoia get to you.

"Something caught your eye back there, Alex?" Briar asks.

"NOT YET," you respond, taking another stride deeper into the shadows. "BUT THAT DOESN'T MEAN THERE'S NOTHING BACK THERE, DOES IT?"

There is a pause among the Fae.

"I thought you checked this place," Robin says.

"We did," Briar replies, "but we didn't go all the way down. And that was a couple of weeks ago, besides."

The smith grunts in acknowledgment at that last part.

"Doesn't smell," Cat offers uncertainly. "Also no prints."

"Good to know, but that only means that if there IS something living down there, it either hasn't come out recently or often enough to leave a trail, it's taking steps to avoid that, or it has some other way to come and go." Your partner groans. "Darn it, Alex, now you've got me imagining what could be down there!"

If it turns out to be nothing, you'll apologize, but before that...

"WHAT SAY WE TAKE A TEN OR FIFTEEN MINUTE BREAK TO CHECK IT OUT?"

"I think we'd better," Robin admits. "Better safe than eaten by a Moldorm."

You pause at the mention of Hyrule's giant segmented worms, and look the terrain over. For all its mineral content, the cave isn't a hundred percent rock and stone; there's plenty of clay, packed earth, and tree roots spread about. Overall, you'd say the ground is at once soft enough and stable enough that a living creature of a certain size and strength could have dug the tunnel ahead of you out with time and patience.

Too bad you can't tell if that's really what happened, or if it's just your imagination getting ahead of you.

Absently adjusting your grip on the pick, you venture forward, the others following behind.

As you noted before, the cave extends some thirty or forty feet back into the hillside. It's fairly level, with only the slightest downward incline - maybe an inch every fifteen feet or so, and the fact you even notice it is something you attribute to the Goron affinity for stone enhancing your own respectable affinity for the Element of Earth. And while the passage is uneven - carved out by natural forces, unthinking beasts, or some intelligent agency that was careful to make it LOOK that way - it's also more or less straight, which is a big reason why you didn't bother to investigate too deeply before; all you needed to do was stand just inside the mouth of the cave, so that your eyes were in shadow, and then cast a simple Spell of Darkvision and look clear to the back. It was empty and unremarkable then, but now?

...

Nope, still empty and unremarkable, at least as far as you can see. Of course, as well-adapted as they are to lower levels of light, Goron eyes still can't see in the dark, and between the depth you've moved into the cave and your own bulk getting in the way, you've lost what light there was.

A quick, hushed conference with Robin sees you casting a modified Spell of Light to give everyone's helmets little headlights.

This doesn't change the fact that there isn't much to be seen. Danging roots aplenty; some loose stones, worn off from the walls or fallen from the ceiling-

*Drip*
*Drip*
*Drip*

-a slowly growing puddle, which you step over; a few fungi. Not much else-

!

-except for the side-passage that goes off at an almost perfect ninety-degree angle from the main tunnel. The mouth of this new route is tall and wide enough for your Goron form to enter, if only just, and it's rather well-hidden behind an outcropping of stone that, viewed from farther than ten feet away, looks like part of the wall at the end of the cave.

The perpendicular path extends roughly fifteen feet before branching off in three different directions: one route continues on more or less straight ahead, though it also follows a more pronounced downward slope; another passage turns back to parallel the tunnel where you stand; and the last way is wedged in between the first two, at roughly a sixty-degree angle from the "corner" where all three routes intersect.

Although these additional routes also look to be the result of natural formation, the way they remained hidden from observation until you were practically on top of them strikes you as a little too fortuitous.

Though again, that might just be your paranoia talking.

Moving cautiously to the intersection, you look around.

The path directly ahead of you continues on for at least another eighty feet, disappearing into shadow and darkness beyond the range of your light and dim-adapted Goron eyes. It's also at a downward incline of about one foot every twenty or twenty-five feet - not steep, then, but plenty to be noticeable. Your transformed nose picks up an increased scent of stone that way, although it's nothing that sets your Goron belly to rumbling, just ordinary rock. Given that the tunnel would be heading deeper under the hill, that makes sense.

The path that goes off at an odd angle remains mostly level, but also meanders; you can only see about fifteen feet ahead before it curves out of sight. The scent down that way remains about the same as the tunnel where you're standing, a musty mix of unpalatable earth, roots, and damp, with scattered hints of rock.

And then there's the right-hand path, which follows a rough curve around behind the end of the entrance tunnel for thirty feet or so before your view is once again cut off. The smells don't seem to change in that direction, either-

!

-but shushing your companions and listening closely, you can just make out the steady drip of water once again, and this time into something quite a bit larger and deeper than a mere puddle.

Maybe it's the simple fact that you can hear something happening in that direction while the other two routes are silent, but the right-hand path calls to you.

Before you venture on, however, you ask Briar to go back and fetch your respective duplicates.

"Are you seriously expecting that much trouble?" your partner wonders.

"BETTER TO HAVE THE EXTRA SPELLPOWER ON HAND AND NOT NEED IT, THAN TO NEED IT AND NOT HAVE IT, RIGHT?"

"...sure, if you want to blow out the hill..." But even as she says that, Briar is turning to make the short hike back up the tunnel.

Cat watches the fairy go for a moment, and then looks at you. "Can do?"

As it happens, you HAVE been studying the Spell of the Sunburst and the Greater Spell of Shouting, but while the former has a large enough blast radius to add quite the sinkhole or crater to this hill you're under, you aren't sure it would cause enough damage to punch through the earth around you. The "burst" in question is composed of Elemental Light rather than conventional heat and kinetic energy, and mundane soil, clay, and wood aren't particularly vulnerable to that. As for the other spell, it's got a much narrower field of effect, and has only limited effect against non-crystalline targets. If these were properly rocky caves, it'd be a different story, but...

"SHE'S EXAGGERATING," you answer. "AT WORST, I MIGHT FLOOD THE TUNNELS WITH WATER OR FIRE, OR MAYBE COLLAPSE ONE OF THEM."

"Please don't," Robin sighs.

Cat makes a sound of cautious agreement.

There is a bit of a delay before Briar returns, but whatever grumbling Shadow Alex did, he's there with the fairy and her (currently much smaller) Shadow.

"THANK YOU BOTH FOR COMING."

"Not a problem!" Shadow Briar says brightly, from where she hovers above her partner as a living light source. "It's an Adventure!"

Briar and Shadow Alex give her strikingly similar looks of resigned annoyance.

"Sorry I don't have any extra hats," Robin adds, speaking to your counterpart.

"IT'S FINE," Shadow Alex replies, before rapping the knuckles of one hand on his transformed head. "GORON SKULLS ARE TOUGH, AND I CAN ALWAYS UNSUMMON MYSELF IF THINGS GO WRONG."

The smith blinks, and then nods slowly, as if he hadn't considered that.

"SO, WHICH WAY ARE WE GOING?"

You indicate the nearest turn. "THAT WAY."

"THEN WHAT ARE WE WAITING FOR? ADVENTURE BECKONS."

"Adventure!" Shadow Briar cheers.

"Adventure!" Cat joins in.

As you follow the curving passage, it takes you behind the end of the entrance tunnel and a little further ahead, before twisting back the other way. The passage starts heading downward at a modest incline, and as you move further and deeper, stone begins to account for more and more of the mass of the walls, floor, and ceiling.

Perhaps fifteen minutes on, the cave begins to narrow, and small stalactites start appearing on the roof. It eventually reaches the point where you and Shadow Alex have to periodically walk sideways - and once, duck - to fit through particularly close sections. Just as it reaches the point where you're wondering if you'll have to start sucking in your gut to squeeze through, the glow of your Light Spell reaches a much wider space up ahead. The sound of dripping water is quite clear now, and rather than a single stream of falling droplets, it's become something of a chorus, almost like a tiny underground rainstorm. You've also noticed a smell, something rich, earthy, and just on the edge of unpleasant, which reminds you of cleaning up after Moblin.

Thusly... encouraged, you suppose... you bear with the discomfort for a few more minutes, before popping out of the end of the tunnel to look around.

You find yourself standing in a stone-walled grotto that forms a rough ellipse perhaps a hundred feet wide, forty feet across, and anywhere from ten to twenty feet high, depending on the elevation of the floor and ceiling. You're on one of the "wide" sides of the geological ovoid, and your Light Spell reaches far enough to give your Goron eyes a good view of the entire chamber.

Off to your left is the source of the steady dripping, a large not-quite-circular pool that takes up... hmm. You make it twenty-five feet by twenty at its widest points, with a little extra, so four hundred square feet and change? And it's about four or five feet deep in the center, besides. The "rain" is runoff from a dozen or so stalactites hanging above the water, seeping steadily through the ceiling above and making their way into the waiting pool; there are more such formations scattered about the room, of course, but they're not as densely clustered as they are over the little reservoir. Some sort of blue-white moss grows thickly on the floor of the pool and about its edges, and much of the remainder of that half of the grotto is covered with dirt, upon which a further profusion of fungi have been allowed to grow in wild disorder. Some are luminescent, others not, and you catch sight of something pale and insect-like skittering about underneath the cap of one three-foot-tall mushroom, before it flees your light.

The cave to your right is taken up a huge stalactite that descends all the way from ceiling to floor, over thirty feet across at the "base" and narrowing down to ten feet across before it hits the ground. You have your doubts that this is an entirely natural formation, partly from the sheer size of the thing, but mostly because there's a door worked into the side of the great stone spike, the finely carved and brightly painted flower-patterns along the frame making it look like it was taken off of the forest cottage of some kindly old granny in a fairy tale.

Which is appropriate, you suppose.

And scattered about the ceiling in their twos and threes and tens, are a colony of bats, their dark little eyes blinking and squeaks of protest rising at your presence and that of the light you bring with you. Like all the other "animals" you've encountered in Faerie thus far, these are bigger than the average Earthly chiropteran - some of them, you note with a suspicious frown, look rather like Keese or Aches - and their protests aren't limited to mere squeaks.

"Who turned the light on?"

"I was having a good dream..."

"Too early to get up..."

"Hey, look! Intruders!"

"That's nice."

"Eeek!"

"Honestly, the nerve!"

"How would you like it if we just flew into your lair while you were sleeping?"

"Hey, look, they've got a fairy!"

Maybe forty pairs of eyes are suddenly fixed on Shadow Briar-

"Yeeep!"

-who promptly ducks into her partner's robe.

Shadow Alex glowers up at the bats. "MY FAIRY."

Briar steps a little closer to you, watching the colony cautiously. Despite her currently human proportions, the bats are big enough and numerous enough that she's probably not entirely comfortable.

"CAT," you say, "DO YOU KNOW WHO MIGHT BE USING THIS PLACE?"

"Hn." Cat's ears, you note, are flat with distaste. "Bat Lady."

"...IS THAT A LADY WHO DRESSES LIKE A BAT, A LADY WHO KEEPS BATS AS COMPANIONS, OR A LADY WHO'S AN ACTUAL BAT?"

It says something about your life that all of those are realistic possibilities, and that this wouldn't even be the first time you've met people who fit the bill.

"All," Cat answers.

"Hail to the Mistress of the Dark!" one of the bats calls out.

"HAIL!" the rest chorus.

"Shhh! Not so loud, you fools! You know how cranky the Mistress is if something wakes her up before noon!"

"...hail..." the chorus repeats in a hushed tone.

"RIGHT. WELL, THEN; FIRST OF ALL, LET ME SAY THAT IT WAS NOT OUR INTENTION TO DISTURB ANYONE'S REST-"

"You brought a light into a dark cave!"

"What did you THINK would happen?"

"Can I go back to sleep, now?"

"-AND SINCE OUR PRESENCE IS CLEARLY A BOTHER, WE'LL JUST BE ON OUR WAY."

"Oh, good."

"And take your light with you!"

"Are they allowed to just leave like that?"

"I think the Mistress-"

There is another mass whispered "hail."

"-might have something to say about that."

"Yeah, but she's asleep. Are YOU going to wake her up?"

There is a flustered flapping of wings. "Certainly not!"

"There's not a lot we can do to stop them, then, is there?"

The duty-minded bat looks from its flock-mate to your group, visibly taking in the size differences. Most of the bats are somewhere around a foot tall in the body, with wings that might reach four feet at full extension, but they seem even more lightly built than the more-or-less normal bats you've seen around the Shuzen residence. Fae creatures do tend to be a bit less robust than their mundane counterparts, you recall, except in cases where they go the other way entirely, like trolls.

The immediate consequence of this is that a single Goron-sized member of your party probably masses as much as most of the colony put together, or even the entire group. So barring your way physically is out of the question. And while the bats do have an aura of Fae magic about them, it's nothing to write home about - especially not when compared to the sorcerous power you and your Shadow can bring to bear.

The bat seems to grasp this. "We could follow them, and report on their movements!"

"You want to do that, be my guest." There is a yawn. "I'm going back to sleep."

"Me, too."

"Me, three."

Sighing in frustration at the lack of vigilance among his fellows, the dutiful bat unfurls his wings in a long, slow stretch. He doesn't immediately let go of his perch, however, perhaps recognizing that there wouldn't be enough room for him to slip over your heads - yours and your Shadow's in particular - and choosing to wait a bit before following you.

For your part, you wait until you're back through the tight part of the tunnel before turning to Robin and asking if the presence of this "Mistress of the Dark"-

From the tunnel behind you comes a faint, "...hail..."

-affects things with regards to the Goddess copper.

"We might want to come back this evening and introduce ourselves," the smith replies, "but aside from that? Not really. We're still in Lady Chloe's domain, and have her permission to dig for the ores. Not to mention that, whoever lives here besides the bats, there's no indication they've used the tunnels recently or been mining the copper at all."

Speaking of the mining, it's been about twenty minutes since you suggested taking a ten or fifteen minute break to explore the cave system. You'll make slighty better time on your way out of the cave than you did coming in, now that you know what's in this backwards S-curving section and the entrance shaft, but you'll still have used up a good half an hour by the time you get back to the intersection. Considering how much Goddess copper you still need, you probably can't spare much more time to go exploring the other tunnels - but fortunately, you're a sorcerer, so you don't need to.

After checking with Robin to confirm that you're far enough from the Goddess copper not to contaminate it - and you are - you pause at the junction of the four tunnels for a minute to cast a modified Spell of the Prying Eyes. As Shadow Alex quickly casts the Spell of Darkvision upon the tiny constructs, you give them their flying orders:

"FOLLOW THAT TUNNEL," you state, pointing at the twisty middle passage. "AT EACH BRANCH, DIVIDE EVENLY TO INVESTIGATE. IF NO FURTHER DIVISION IS POSSIBLE OR A DEAD-END IS REACHED, RETURN HERE."

The eighteen floating eyes blink once, acknowledging their instructions, and then turn and fly off down the as-yet unexplored tunnel.

The now-solitary bat, who caught up with you while you were casting, now frowns upside-down at you from the ceiling.

"If you were capable of casting a spell like that, why didn't you simply do so from the start?"

You look up, and join Cat, your doppelganger, and the Briars in explaining: "ADVENTURE!"

The bat blinks. Slowly. "...I see. Well, in that case, I will say nothing to ruin the surprise of what lies down those passages."

"THAT WOULD BE APPRECIATED."

With that, you head down the far-left route. As you noted earlier, the tunnel slopes gently downwards, but otherwise largely maintains its direction and dimensions as you head deeper into the hillside. Meanwhile, the walls, floor, and ceiling very gradually shift in composition, roots and packed earth disappearing in favor of clay and stone. You would have expected it to start getting drier as the walls got less porous, but the dank atmosphere doesn't seem to change.

Then, about five hundred feet along and twenty to twenty-five feet down from where you started, the tunnel comes out of the side of a wall and onto a little cliff, perhaps six or seven feet long and about twice that in width. Past that, the floor simply falls away into a dark chasm, while the walls stretch out past the range of your light in both directions; another hundred feet on, a slender shaft of light pierces the void from somewhere above, but it illuminates nothing that you can make out, aside from part of the ceiling, some thirty feet higher than your present location.

Searching the ground at your feet, you find a few loose stones, but nothing more.

As you glance into the abyss, you are very, very briefly tempted to pick up one of the rocks and let it fall, just to get an idea of how deep the darkness is. But you resist the impulse; there really is no telling how far down this gaping void goes, or what might be down there, beyond the range of your senses.

*Scratch*

The sound has you turning to face Cat, who has slipped past your bulky frame, bent down to pick up one of the smaller stones, and is just extending her arm towards the edge of the cliff in a relaxed throw.

"WAIT A-"

Aaaand there it goes.

In spite of yourself, you stand there in silence, watching as the lightly cast stone goes over the edge of the cliff and down the side of the cavern wall, until it passes out of the limited radius of your Spell of Light, at which point you listen on as it continues to fall.

...

*Click*

...
*Clack*

...

...

After a long pause, you think you hear a tiny, distant *bloop* from below.

You turn to frown at Cat, who blinks back at you in puzzlement.

"WHY?"

She shrugs, unrepentantly. "Was there."

...

"For the record," Shadow Briar pipes up from behind you, "I would have done it if I were bigger."

"Fortunately, you aren't," Briar notes.

"Oh, don't say that like you weren't thinking about it, too."

You eye the apparently watery depths below with some concern, but after a minute or so has passed without some pallid, blank-eyed leviathan or wall-hugging mutant albino amphibian rising from the darkness to destroy you all, you figure that whatever body of water is down there must not be inhabited by anything with the capability or curiosity to make the trip back up the chasm.

"I don't think we have time to explore this in person," Robin notes, looking past you into the dark cave.

"I WAS THINKING MUCH THE SAME THING," you admit. "SENDING OFF ANOTHER BATCH OF PRYING EYES AND RETURNING TO OUR BUSINESS SEEMS IN ORDER. ANY OBJECTIONS?"

"Are you sure you don't want me to just fly over there and see where the light's coming from?" Shadow Briar offers.

"ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO FLY OUT OVER A MYSTERIOUS CHASM THAT MAY OR MAY NOT BE INHABITED, ALL BY YOURSELF, AND BE A HUNDRED FEET FROM HELP IF SOMETHING NOTICES YOU AND GETS INTERESTED?"

"So, what say we hurry up and get back to the digging?" the little clone says without missing a beat. "That ore won't mine itself!"

As the rest of the party turns about and starts making their way back up the long shaft, you and Shadow Alex hang behind to cast your Darkvision/Prying Eyes combo.

"ONE PAIR MAP THE SHAFT; THE REST, SPREAD OUT BUT STAY WITHIN SIGHT OF EACH OTHER. TRY MAPPING THE WATER, BUT AVOID LARGE FISH."

That should give you enough coverage and redundancy to get an idea of the dimensions of the cave, at least down to the surface of the water. Anything past that will depend on the depth, clarity, current, and habitability of the... pond? Lake? There's probably a technical name for "large body of water in a cave," but it's not coming to mind.

As your latest batch of scouts go about their business, you and your not-evil twin move to follow the rest of the party back to the near-surface.

While you hike up the gentle incline of the tunnel, you glance up at the bat that is continuing to trail you.

"IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE HANGING AROUND THE REST OF THE MORNING," you begin, "IS THERE SOMETHING WE SHOULD CALL YOU?"

"You may call me 'Sir,'" comes the smug reply.

"ON ANOTHER NOTE, WHAT ARE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT REGULAR BATS?"

There is another upside-down frown of puzzlement. "Why do you ask?"

"I'M CURIOUS."

"...they're animals. Certainly more closely related to me and mine than, say, a cat or a bear or something, but still."

You nod. "AND LIVING VAMPIRES?"

Dark eyes blink. "Are you quite serious?"

"YES."

A fuzzy head shakes. "I've never met one, but if the rumors I've heard are accurate, they would fit in rather well with the Winter Court."

And here he is, one of the largely unaligned lesser Fae, living in service to a mysterious Mistress-

Hail.

-who has herself chosen to reside within the domain of a Great Fairy. That should tell you a few things about the bat's views on Winter.

When you reach the intersection, a couple of Eyes from your first batch are hovering there, waiting to make their reports. You absorb the information, and find that the twisting middle tunnel quickly breaks up into a series of minor caves and offshoot tunnels. Initially, these are much like the passage you're standing in and the other nearby chambers, but as with the tunnel leading to the abyss, the deeper you go down the middle route, the rockier things become.

"'SIR BATS,' THEN."

You're in a good enough mood to humor the silly request - but you're also not about to let the little Fae think it's fine to boss you around.

"'SIR BATS,' THEN?" is your counter-offer.

The chiropteran blinks. "But... there is only the one of me?"

"BUT OF ALL YOUR COLONY, YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE TO DEMONSTRATE DILIGENCE IN YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES," you counter. "IT COULD BE ARGUED, THEN, THAT YOU ARE DOING THE WORK OF SEVERAL BATS, AND SHOULD BE RECOGNIZED FOR IT."

The fluffy body hanging from the ceiling puffs right up with pride. "It IS nice to be appreciated..."

"ALSO, THE OTHER NAME THAT CAME TO MIND IS 'SIR BATTINGTON,'" you admit. "IF YOU'D PREFER THAT..."

He seems to consider that for a moment, but finally says, "Let's go with 'Sir Bats.'"

"SO BE IT."

Ultimately, the layout and contents of these caves are secondary to your purpose in being here. You came to mine Goddess copper, and that's what you should be doing.

Besides, while you shortened the duration on your Spells of Prying Eyes somewhat, your mastery of Divination Magic is such that they'll still remain active for over two and a half hours - provided nothing destroys them. That will be about the point that you stop for lunch, so why not take advantage of the timing?

And so you head on up to the mouth of the tunnel, Shadow Alex trudging along in your wake.

Sir Bats winces in the general direction of the comparatively well-lit cave mouth, but dutifully keeps pace with you.

"AS IT HAPPENS," you note, "I KNOW A SPELL THAT ALLOWS THOSE SENSITIVE TO BRIGHT LIGHT TO ENDURE IT UNFLINCHINGLY."

"Oh, don't tempt me," Sir Bats groans.

"YOU'RE SURE?"

"I am. I could not in good conscience put myself in your debt in the course of fulfilling my own duties; it would be wrong, and more importantly, it would oblige the Mistress-"

"Hail!" Shadow Briar calls out, in time with the voice in your head.

"-to... you." Sir Bats pauses to regard the dark fairy suspiciously. "Is she messing with me?"

"ALMOST CERTAINLY."

"STILL MY FAIRY," Shadow Alex adds, as he passes you to take up his original post on watch.

Ulfr, who appears to have been lying at rest outside the cave for some time, and was just listening to Cat's excited description of what your Adventure turned up deeper in the tunnels, looks up as the darker-toned Goron stomps closer. Something unspoken passes between them, and the wolf gets up, stretching mightily, before nudging Cat once and loping off to resume his patrol.

The catgirl sighs. "Back to work?"

"BACK TO WORK," you agree.

Before too long, you are back in the groove, the striking of tools and the singing of notes in rough harmony. Shadow Alex still refuses to join in, but Sir Bats gets caught up in the mood and sings squeakily along, and once, when Ulfr's route brings him past the mouth of the cave, he howls along for a bit as well.

You spare a moment's thought for how only one of your companions seems to find it weird to hum, sing, or whistle as they work, and wonder if it's a Fae thing.

Gained Mining E (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Singing E (Plus)

By your calculations, it's still some twenty minutes to the lunch hour when Robin calls a halt to the work. He explains that he still needs more Goddess copper, but the rate at which the ore has been turning up has started to fall off. You've noticed that yourself, and inquire if this means the vein has been depleted.

"Kind of," Robin replies with a shrug. "It's more that it would take more time to get at whatever's left than it would to just relocate to an untapped deposit."

"WHAT ABOUT EXPLOSIVES?" Shadow Alex suggests.

"I really must object to the idea!" Sir Bats states hastily.

"Even if you hadn't, I wouldn't want to use them," Robin replies, glancing around at the walls of the cave, and the earth, clay, and roots that account for most of their composition. "Maybe if this was a rocky cave, and we had time for an expert to come in and work out where all the stress lines were, but setting off a Bomb in all this dirt would like as not bring half the roof down on our heads. It would also contaminate the ore, chemically as much elementally, and the mix of the two is even more of a pain to purify."

Important safety tip for using Bombs and other explosives, then.

Gained Explosives F (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Geology E (Plus)

All in all, it appears that you're done with this deposit. While everyone hands the tools back to Robin, you request that Shadow Alex take care of teleporting everyone to the next mining site and conjuring the Magnificent Mansion for lunch-

-while you head back down to the intersection of tunnels to check up on your Prying Eyes.

When you round the corner a minute later-

!

-and flinch as you find a cloud of some thirty disembodied crystalline eyeballs hovering before you, STAAAARING endlessly at you as they wait to have their reports taken.

Even if you were sort of expecting it, the sight is still decidedly uncanny, particularly in these poorly lit conditions.

Shaking off your uneasiness, you reach out one hand and start calling the Eyes forward to absorb their information.

It quickly becomes apparent that the tangle of tunnels and caves down the middle path is not limited to its nearest reaches; if anything, it only gets worse as one heads deeper in that direction. Several of your little scouting constructs return images that you would swear are of the exact same caves, merely at different angles, and yet, when they take what should be the same turns, they end up going down different paths altogether. So either there are parts of the caves that look the same but really aren't, or some of the tunnels are moving around.

A number of those caves are inhabited, too. Thanks to the Spell of Darkvision, your Eyes were able to scope out a few more scattered groups of Fae bats, assorted insects and annelids that crawled, skittered, and here and there flew about, and an abundance of fungi - some of it moving. There were larger inhabitants as well, particularly around a deep pool and slow-moving stream further in: pale fish the size of your arm; silently croaking cave toads big enough to have a go at swallowing Sir Bats; and one oversized lizard, close to nine feet in length if you counted the neck and tail, with what appeared to be mushrooms growing on its back.

As for the chasm, it turns out to have been roughly circular, over two hundred feet across at its widest point, and two-thirds as deeper - maybe deeper, as even with Darkvision, the refractive properties of water prevented the Eyes from seeing to the bottom of that lake. The majority of that space was unsurprisingly empty, though your scouts did find half a dozen more hole-in-the-wall entrances to other passages; due to the limitations of their programming, they didn't explore these too deeply, but like the tunnel that led you down to the edge of the void in the first place, these shafts all seemed suspiciously straight. Some went up, others went down, and one seemed to go on perfectly level.

The water, as noted, was deep enough for the bottom to be obscure - ten feet or more, you'd guess - and it was full of life. Your scouts spotted moss and lichens in abundance, and even a few honest plants managing to survive on an island near the center of the lake, where the thin shaft of sunlight falling from above was most concentrated. More cave-fish and frogs of the sort spotted in the middle galleries were present as well, the latter claiming small moss-covered islets as seats; the Eyes saw two particularly large specimens squatting on opposite sides of the main island, puffing themselves up and likely croaking up a storm in a contest for dominance.

Though even those two went still when something rather larger flashed out of the water at one point. Your Eyes caught an image of splashing water, silvery scales along a serpentine body, and glowing red eyes before the creature disappeared beneath the surface, taking one of the smaller toads with it.

Lastly, there's the sunlit shaft. Only one of the Eyes you sent up there came back, and that's because the one that took the lead got snagged by a hungry or curious bird. There seems to be a small colony of feathered beings scattered about the shaft, nesting anywhere the rocks could support a body or three, but most of the nests were empty; your surviving Eye spotted perhaps three more residents during its ascent and return, out of a good twenty or thirty nests, most of which could have held several occupants.

Aside from the birds, the shaft was also home to its own little garden of cliff-dwelling fungi and plants, with flowering vines accounting for much of the latter. More insects buzzed about, as one might expect, and your probe caught a fuzzy view of a three-foot lizard stealthily making its way down the shaft towards the nests, body blurring against the stone and vines like a cartoon chameleon or the Predator on the hunt.

The shaft proved to be about sixty feet deep, and the top was near the summit of the hill, hidden from overhead view by the eaves of several of the forest's ancient trees. Which at least explains why you didn't spot it when you were flying about this region on your prior prospecting trip.

In total, of the thirty-eight Prying Eyes you sent out, seven were lost. The cause for four of those was the local wildlife trying to catch them, but as for the other three, you can't say; none of them had other Eyes in position to see what took them out.

You give the information a moment to settle, and then turn about and head to join your party for lunch.

Sir Bats ruffles his wings. "As I said earlier, it would not do for me to indebt my Mistress-"

Hail.

"-to you on my own account."

"I HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN, BUT HAVE YOU PAUSED TO CONSIDER THAT, AS WE WILL BE DINING IN A DIFFERENT AREA, JOINING US WOULD POSE SOMETHING OF AN INCONVENIENCE TO YOU? BOTH IN DISTANCE TRAVELED AWAY FROM YOUR LAIR, AND IN PREVENTING YOUR RETURN TO A WELL-EARNED REST?" You shrug. "IT SEEMS TO MEET THAT COMPENSATING YOU FOR SUCH TROUBLES WOULD ONLY BE BALANCING THE SCALES."

The bat blinks. "On second thought, I could use a snack before calling it a day."

That said, rather than join Shadow Alex's group of teleporters, Sir Bats hangs around to keep an eye on you while you're gathering the results of your Prying Eyes' investigation of the deeper caves.

This is convenient for you, since it allows you to ask him what he knows about the water-serpent as soon as you see the images of it.

"Not much, to be honest," Sir Bats admits. "The Mistress-"

Hail.

"-used to visit the lake to fish or to listen to the toads, but ever since that snake showed up, she has found the mood to be entirely spoiled for either. She made several attempts to evict it, but the Mistress's power-"

Hail.

"-is drawn from and focused upon the forces of the night. Air and darkness, moon and stars, beasts of the earth, wood, and sky! What music we make under her guidance!" Sir Bats waxes rapturously for a moment, and then sighs in dismay. "Unfortunately, her power does not work so well underwater, and the interloper seldom if ever leaves its preferred environs."

Hm. You sense a potential opportunity in this... however, it will need to wait until your primary objective is concluded. Possibly until you've mastered the Gate Spell. You're getting close...

With the last of the Eyes' information gathered, you signal for Sir Bats to join you.

One of the little advantages of Teleportation Magic is that, barring certain warding magics and exotic (super)natural phenomenon, you can use it pretty much anywhere. Being sixty-odd feet down the mouth of a cave and under perhaps twenty feet of living earth and cold stone are no barrier at all.

When you catch up with the rest of your party a moment later, you find that Shadow Alex has already set up the Magnificent Mansion, and everyone other than your doppelganger has gone inside. You pause at the threshold to make sure that Sir Bats can enter - hanging from your raised right arm with his wings folded tight about his head and sensitive eyes no doubt squeezed tightly shut, he's hardly in a position to do so under his own power - but Shadow Alex did not forget to add your latest guest to the list of "invitation only" individuals allowed to enter the Mansion, nor did he take the opportunity to prank you.

Once you're inside, you find that Shadow Alex spared some consideration for Sir Bats' late addition to your lunch party. The light within the Mansion is much lower than usual, barely more than a few scattered candles, and once the door has closed behind your counterpart and shut off the light of Faerie's midday twilight, it becomes quite dim.

"Oh, that is much better," Sir Bats sighs, as he unfurls his wings again.

"I WOULD BE A POOR HOST, IF I FAILED TO ACCOUNT FOR THE NEEDS OF MY GUESTS," Shadow Alex says.

On that note, instead of a chair like most of the guests have received, or a pile of pillows like the one where Ulfr lounges, Shadow Alex has created a perch at one of the places along the table. The wooden stand's single arm curves over the food at just the right angle and distance for Sir Bats to hang within comfortable reach of his meal, and is surrounded on all sides by an opaque veil, helping to make up for the greater number of candles upon and around the table. One of the phantom servants stands at the ready to assist Sir Bats by fetching whatever he desires from the spread provided - and there is quite a bit to choose from.

Your companions, you note, have already picked out their first courses, but have at least done you the courtesy of waiting on your arrival to start eating.

Although the food provided by the Magnificent Mansion is merely "exceptionally good mundane fare" and not "magically delicious and nutritious" like that conjured up by a Heroes' Feast, it's still probably better than any other meal that Cat and Ulfr have ever had, barring the Feasts you served to them this morning and Friday evening. The Mansion also has the distinct advantage of extra portions.

As a result of this, Cat and Ulfr finish their second servings and start eyeing the seemingly everful table as if considering going back for thirds, which forces you to step in and gently dissuade them.

"But fiiiissssh," Cat protests.

"THE FOOD WILL STILL BE HERE FOR DINNER," you say firmly. "THE MAGIC WILL KEEP IT FROM GOING BAD, AND NO ONE CAN ENTER THE MANSION WITHOUT PERMISSION. BESIDES, IF THE TWO OF YOU EAT ANY MORE, I'M WORRIED YOU'LL GET SICK WHEN WE START DIGGING - THAT, OR YOU'LL END UP IN A FOOD COMA."

The catgirl and the wolf don't seem to actively disbelieve you, but all the same, there's a visible reluctance in their movements as they get up and leave the table.

"Besides," Briar adds, "you can always grab snacks during breaks."

From the way Cat's ears perk up and her eyes begin to sparkle, she hadn't thought that far ahead yet.

While the rest of your group make their way out of the Mansion, Sir Bats decides to hang out where he is.

"It's surprisingly comfortable in here," he yawns. "It's warm, dry, the little lights are dim enough that I don't even notice them when I close my eyes, and we're no longer in the Mistress's territory."

Hail.

"Throw in a good meal on top of that-" Sir Bats breaks off for a larger, jaw-stretching yawn. "-goodness me. Even if I wasn't operating on short sleep, I'd be tempted to take a nap. As it is..."

You shrug, wish him pleasant dreams, and leave him to it.

"Do you think he'll be able to get any sleep over the noise of our digging?" Briar wonders.

"I INCLUDED A FEW DOORS IN THE MANSION'S ARCHITECTURE IN ANTICIPATION OF THAT," Shadow Alex notes. "THEY SHOULD HELP."

Sure enough, as you exit the dining area, two of the phantom servants start pulling on a wheel off to one side. With a slow, steady clanking of unseen mechanisms, thick wooden doors slide out of the walls of the arched passage that connects the Mansion's dining room to the front hall. You'd put the wood at a good three or four inches in thickness, and when the eight-foot-tall doors slide shut, there is a distinct *whumph* of displaced air underneath the soft *boom* of their soft collision.

"Biiiig door," Cat observes, seeming slightly intimidated.

"INDEED. WHAT HAPPENS IF SIR BATS WAKES UP AND DECIDES HE WANTS TO LEAVE?"

"THERE'S ANOTHER WINCH TO OPERATE THE DOOR IN THE DINING ROOM, AND A COUPLE OF THE SERVANTS ARE ON STANDBY TO LEND THEIR HANDS."

Your Shadow self definitely thought this through, you muse as you leave the Mansion-

!

-only to pause with one foot hovering over the threshold.

For the second time in less than an hour, you are surrounded by staring eyes - only this time, instead of constructs of your own magic, they are the eyes of dozens of forest-dwelling Fae, who are regarding you and the Mansion behind you with unabashed anticipation.

Part of your mind idly observes that, unlike the fairies you're most used to, THESE little Fae clearly don't suffer from long-term memory problems. Their skills of pattern-recognition are also clearly well-developed.

The rest of you wonders how you're going to deal with the... hmmm, forty-five, fifty, fifty-five... make it sixty-plus minor Fae that have invited themselves to lunch, assuming you aren't miscounting some of those eyes that are grouped close enough together that they might belong to a single creature. Perhaps your companions have an idea...?

In the middle of pulling on his mining gear again, Robin spares you a look that's been worn by big brothers across space and time since the first precocious younger sibling got into trouble too many times for someone's patience to handle. "You have no one but yourself to blame for this situation," that look says, "and I'm not going to lift a finger to do anything about it except point and laugh when it blows up on you."

No help there, then - and one glance at the giggling Briars tells you they're not going to pull you out of this minor pickle, either.

"Our food!" Cat protests, looking like she's trying to puff herself up intimidatingly. "Go away!"

Privately, you find Ulfr's looming presence and low warning growl to be rather more effective deterrents - although even he only succeeds in making the crowd back up, rather than disperse.

"I COULD PROBABLY HAVE THE SERVANTS MOVE SOME OF THE FOOD TO THE FRONT HALL, CLOSE ALL THE DOORS, AND THEN INVITE THEM IN," Shadow Alex notes in an aside. "BUT THEN THEY'D HAVE THE RUN OF THE MANSION FOR THE REST OF THE DAY."

Not an ideal situation, no, but maybe if you got the Fae to promise to behave themselves while they were inside the Mansion? In exchange for some food now and more food later?

Alternately, you could cast the Spell to Create Food and Drink. This line of thought says that they weren't invited, so they shouldn't get the good stuff, but acknowledges that you're enough of a soft touch with the Little Folk that you're reluctant to turn them away empty-handed. Or empty-bellied, as the case may be.

Then again, maybe you should harden your heart? Feeding wild animals teaches them bad habits, and there are surely no animals wilder than the Wild Fae - and while some of the damage has already been done on that front, you could run damage control, and try to keep it from worsening. Of course, Fae being Fae, they might turn around and try to "encourage" you to change your mind...

"THOSE THAT DO NOT WORK, DO NOT EAT," you state firmly. "THIS FOOD WAS BARGAINED FOR IN GOOD FAITH BY CAT AND ULFR, IN EXCHANGE FOR SERVICES RENDERED, AND THEY HAVE NOT YET HAD THEIR FULL SHARE."

Many tiny eyes droop in despair.

"Noooo!"

"Whyyyy must the world be so cruel!?"

"You heard him," a birdlike Fae sighs, shaking his plumed head. "A deal's a deal."

"But food!"

"Food that's prepared for you!"

"Food that's COOKED!"

"Food you DON'T have to hunt and kill!"

"Food that doesn't TALK BACK when you eat it!"

Most of the mob seems to pause at that. It's NOT just the carnivores or omnivores, either; you notice a few critters that you'd identify as herbivores wearing expressions of deep longing after that last outcry.

This plane, man. This wonderful, awful plane. It's Disney on the surface, and Brothers Grimm underneath - and THIS is in the territory of a Great Fairy, whose kind you know to share a lot of values and mindset with your average benevolent, exceptionally magically powerful mortal. You can hardly imagine what the demesnes of Winter must be like.

...well, no; that's a lie. You CAN imagine it, you just don't WANT to.

Shaking off unpleasant images of suffering, terror, and chilly darkness, you focus on the matter at hand. "AS I SAID, THOSE WHO DO NOT WORK, DO NOT EAT - BUT BY THE SAME TOKEN, IT ONLY SEEMS FAIR THAT THOSE WHO DO WORK, SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO EAT. YES?"

"YES!"

"Absolutely!"

"Guys, he's baiting you. With actual FOOD, even."

"Shut up, Good Judgment, I'm hungry!"

"Me, too!"

With one or two exceptions, the crowd is quite willing to work for their daily, guaranteed not to talk back or scream in mortal agony bread, but that does beg the question of what exactly you would have them do. A mob of minor Fae forest critters aren't the best candidates for digging up metallic ores, let alone for doing so to the standards Robin has requested; while none of this lot are powerhouses even by the modest standards of the Little Folk, they're all inherently magical enough to cause some issue if they lent their hands, claws, or other appendages to the actual job of pulling Goddess copper from the earth. Not to mention how easy it would be for them to get underfoot, or under-hammer...

A support role, then, like watching for trouble? But you already have Ulfr, Shadow Alex, and Shadow Briar doing that, do you really need this many more eyes, ears, antennae, and assorted other sensory organs? And would their "assistance" really be worthwhile?

Is there some other task the Fae could perform right now that comes to mind?

A potential form of "employment" comes to mind, and you quickly consult with Robin as to its viability.

The smith considers it, then starts going through his pouches and pockets, pulling out the two buckets you'd been using to move loose earth and rocks out of the way at your previous dig sites, some small (at human scale) scoops, a set of tongs, four hand-picks and as many one-handed hammers (once again at human scale), a large section of canvas-

What?

-an extra-long coil of rope-

That makes sense, you should never go adventuring without rope or something that can stand in for it.

-an eleven-foot pole-

"NOT TEN FEET?" you ask.

"Bokoblin trapsmiths are bastards," is the only explanation Robin offers.

-and some woodworking tools.

It takes some further explanation, a fair amount of coaxing, at least one reminder that those who do not work, will not eat, and some minor spellcasting on your part, but eventually you get your Fae workforce sorted out. Some of the (naturally) largest Fae take over bucket duty, working in twos or threes as needed, while a couple others receive human-

"WAAAAIIIIT!" one of the Fae in question, a wizened, gnome-looking fellow, shouts desperately.

"...YES?" you inquire after a moment.

"Can you turn us into dwarves?"

"...I CAN, BUT WHY- OH, WAIT." You facepalm. "DUH."

The gnome nods. "Yeah. If we're going to turn into biggers to mine, there's no better bigger for it than a dwarf!"

Were you a true Goron, you might take that as a challenge. As it is...

"Yeah!"

"Absolutely!"

"I don't know why they're called 'dwarves' when they're so big, but..."

-make that DWARVEN proportions and strength courtesy of the Spell to Alter One's Self, and join the front line of the mining effort.

"Look at me!" the once-gnome, now-dwarf chortles through his fine, ankle-length beard. "I'm a DWARF!"

"Beer!"

"Beards!"

"Mining!"

"GOOOOLD!"

As each bucket is filled, it gets dragged over to and dumped out on the canvas, the edges of which have been reinforced with a wooden frame that uses the eleven-foot pole and some dead branches gathered from the forest and whittled into shape. Robin goes through the mess, sorting the ore from the dross, while another team of Fae remain on standby, ready to use the smaller picks and hammers (which they still need both hands to wield) to reduce certain chunks to more manageable size.

Once Robin deems that all the useful material has been extracted, a fourth group of the Little Folk pulls on the rope that's been woven through the frame and hung over a sturdy tree-branch, dragging the canvas up off the ground until it tips over, dumping the remaining load to one side. Then they lower the frame back into place for the next bucket-load to be delivered, and while waiting for their next "big heave-ho!" they scoop up the earth in tiny handfuls and spidersilk sacks and carry it off in different directions, scattering the dirt in a manner that's less offensive to their sensibilities.

Those members of the mob that are physically or temperamentally unsuited to mining join Ulfr in watching the perimeter. You've got a lot more workers, many of them tiny, and hence a lot more potential points of vulnerability, so the extra eyes are quite welcome. Ulfr doesn't seem to mind at all, and it occurs to you that, being a wolf, working in a group is probably second nature to him.

As for those Fae who have no useful skills at all, you put them in management positions. They seem quite happy to boss the workers around, and the workers in turn are perfectly happy to nod their heads, smile, and then ignore the managers' nonsense and get on with their actual jobs.

You also learn a new mining song, which your transformed dwarves swear is a Traditional Dwarven Mining Song. It runs thusly:

Gold, gold, gold, gold,
gold, gold, gold, gold-

"WE'RE ACTUALLY DIGGING FOR GODDESS COPPER," you interrupt them.

This prompts a moment's quiet debate among the false dwarves, but the matter seems quickly resolved:

Copper, copper,
Goddess copper-

"Hey, it works!"

Anyway, it's not long before the entire Fae crew has joined in the tune in some manner, reinforcing your earlier suspicions about Faeries and spontaneous musical numbers, while also leaving Shadow Alex as the only being in earshot not actively singing, humming, whistling, buzzing, barking, or otherwise making music.

Gained King of Faeries C (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Music D (Plus)
Gained Singing E (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Webweaving F (Plus) (Plus)

They say that many hands make for light work, and while many of THESE hands are quite tiny - or not even proper hands - there does seem to be some truth to the saying, because the afternoon positively flies by, and before you know it, Robin is calling for a halt.

"DID WE EXHAUST THIS SITE, TOO?" you inquire.

"It's starting to run down," the smith admits, "but more to the point, I've got all that I need, and a little extra for safety's sake besides."

...oh. Well, then.

"IN THAT CASE, WHO'S UP FOR AN EARLY DINNER?"

There is a general cheer of approval.

Is there anything else you wish to do before leaving Faerie today?

Dinner with the Fae is an experience, to say the least.

Inviting the Little Folk to join you for a meal goes smoothly enough. The Spell of the Magnificent Mansion only allows designated individuals to enter, but it's not picky about whether you name names while the spell is being cast or add them to the guest list after the fact, and the Fae agree to behave themselves.

As they're Wild Fae, and a mix of animalistic and childish mentalities besides, you're not holding out a lot of hope for their table manners.

While the dining table is large enough to accommodate all of your small-to-tiny new guests, the chairs, dishware, and utensils are another matter. You and Shadow Alex end up having the servants rearrange the dishes and then conjuring a lot of tiny pillows in the freed-up space for the Little Folk to sit on. Between the Fae's diminutive sizes and mostly non-humanoid body forms, you give up on the idea of cutlery altogether and let them use their hands or nearest equivalents.

Your suspicions about your new guests' table manners - or lack thereof - are shortly validated, as even with all servants' hands on deck, some minor feats of telekinesis from you and your clone, and a little help from the larger guests besides, the impatient, hungry, and wild nature of your Fae dining companions leads to all kinds of incidents.

Unused to being served, some of the more bird-like diners stab their beaks into whatever food catches their eye and bite off a portion before the servants can react. This leads to other Faeries calling "Dibs!" and grabbing at what they want. Several minor food fights break out, one fairy nearly drowns in the gravy bowl - twice - you aren't entirely sure that you successfully thwarted all the attempts at dining on fellow guests, and watching the otherwise well-behaved spiders puke up digestive acid on their meals threatens to put you off your food altogether. There is a general air of festivity bordering on rowdiness, and some of the Fae may or may not be getting drunk on the milk - either that or they just really enjoy it.

Briar declares it a successful party.

Towards the end of the proceedings, you announce your intention to return to the cave and present yourself to the Mistress of the Dark-

Hail.

-just to make sure there are no hard feelings for your accidental intrusion upon her servants and garden.

Robin agrees it's not a bad idea, the Shadows decide to dismiss themselves, and Cat and Ulfr trade speaking glances before the former declares that they'll come with you.

"Polite," Cat admits with a shrug.

Leaving the Fae to enjoy themselves while the Mansion lasts, you lend an arm to Sir Bats again and lead your other companions outside, where you cast the Spell of Teleportation and blink back to the mouth of the cave.

Sir Bats immediately takes flight. "I shall go on ahead and see if the Mistress-"

Hail.

"-is awake and in the mood for visitors," his voice comes back to you.

As you re-don your safety hats, reapply the Spell of Light, and start making your way down the entrance shaft, Briar inquires if this will be your last stop before heading home.

"I WAS THINKING OF VISITING LADY CHLOE AND LORD RAKA AFTER THIS," you answer, "TO LET THEM KNOW THAT WE HAD COMPLETED OUR TASK."

Your partner shrugs. "Also not a bad idea."

You aren't moving in any sort of hurry, and have only just reached the intersection at the end of the first tunnel when Sir Bats returns.

Hovering in mid-air, he announces, "I bring greetings from the Mistress of the Dark-"

Yet again, hail.

"-and extend her invitation to join her for afternoon tea."

You figure you still have room for a cup. "LEAD THE WAY, SIR BATS."

In due course, you return to the subterranean garden, where you find the bats are somewhat more active - and vocal - than they were this morning.

"Well, well, look who's back."

"The intruders have returned!"

"By the Mistress-"

"HAIL!"

"-that one's HUGE!"

"You're only just noticing this?"

"He wasn't any smaller this morning, you know."

"I was half-asleep, I thought I'd dreamed him!"

The other major difference in the cave is that a soft purple light now radiates from certain characters scrawled into the wooden frame of the door set into the giant stalactite. As if sensing your observation, the door swings open without a sound, revealing a dimly-lit corridor beyond that is entirely too large to fit into the mundane dimensions of the stone structure. An aura of Darkness emanates from within, reasonably strong but also startlingly pure.

"Enter, strangers, and Little Cat," a smooth voice murmurs from the shadows inside, "and be welcome in my home."

Cat's ears flatten in annoyance at the appellation, but she sets her shoulders and marches for the door in a determined manner. The rest of you follow in her wake, and the door closes automatically behind you without so much as a click.

Within the glow of your own Light Spell, you look around. The corridor looks like it could have been taken out of the Drake Estate or even Castle Shuzen, with the underlying stone structure softened by the presence of various high-quality furnishings - chairs, side tables, dressers, rug, wall-hangings, and more - all done in an old-fashioned style that is vaguely European and vaguely... not. Most of the rooms either have closed doors or are dark - or would be without the light of your hats - but one door towards the middle of the too-long hall has more of that glowing purple scrawl lit up along its frame, and a faint white light reaches out from within.

Remembering your manners, you remove your hat, and hang it from a nearby rack.

You let your companions know that you're about to turn your Spell of Light off before doing so. As the glow of the hardhats winks out and the darkness rushes in, you take a minute to let your eyes adjust.

If you were in human form, you'd be pretty close to blind right about now, but between your Goron eyes and the dim-to-modest illumination provided by your hostess, you have reasonable visibility, which will get a bit better as you get used to the lack of light.

Paranoia still has you considering casting the Spell of Darkvision on your entire party, but you refrain, for a few reasons.

For one thing, spellcasting in someone else's home without permission or obvious need is rude.

For another, your companions all have better-than-human eyesight under these sorts of conditions, and moreover, none of them are showing any sign of discomfort or concern over the current low level of illumination.

And finally, Cat is already halfway down the hall, heading for the room that's actually got a light on, with Robin not far behind her.

Mentally grumbling about overconfident Fae and tactical considerations, you move to follow.

The room in question is, to your complete lack of surprise, appointed in the same overall manner as those chambers at the Drake and Shuzen residences where you've been served tea in the past. Three wooden chairs and a big stool form a semi-circle on the near side of the round table, whose pure white, lacily embroidered covering cloth reaches almost to the floor. The stool is broad enough to support a Goron's bulk, and doesn't have "legs" so much as three broad "toes" supporting the base; it also whispers of the Fae equivalent of Transformation Magic, telling you it was reshaped in anticipation of your arrival. The other chairs seem mundane enough, if of superb, slightly alien quality, their seats, backs, and arms all pillowed purple plush on one side and elaborate scrollwork on the other(s). Similarly, a silver teaset sits at the middle of the table, with four white porcelain cups wrapped in silver bands and matching saucers at the ready before it; one of those pairs is noticeably larger than the rest, and glows with the residue of a size-altering spell.

On the opposite side of the table is another cup and saucer, banded in gold instead of silver, and beyond that stands a chair of a slightly better quality than the guest seats, its cushions just a touch more plush and its carvings a shade more elaborate. It also looks... spiky.

And to one side of that chair, having stood to greet you, is your hostess. Slender in build and perhaps five and a half feet tall, she wears a slim black gown with long-backed sleeves that trail almost to the floor, and a hem that not only reaches the floor, but spills outwards in all directions like the legs of a creeping spider. Pulled over slight shoulders is a shawl of violet with characters and symbols of black, white, and gold sewn into it, which spills down her back like a fuzzy black cape, again reaching almost to the floor.

The lady herself is lovely, but in a distinctly inhuman manner. She has a long, narrow face with an almost pointed chin, a nose nearly as straight and sharp as that of the Gerudo - if not so long - and beneath long, slender black brows that jut out past the sides of her head rest unnervingly large eyes of a deep violet hue, which threatens to fade to black in the low lighting conditions. Her skin is pale, and her midnight hair is worn in a style that makes you wonder if this Faerie has seen Disney's take on Sleeping Beauty, or if the artist who came up with the character design for Maleficent had found some real-life inspiration.

The long, pointy ears are practically an afterthought.

All of that is just the physical. On the mystical side of things, you can confirm that this woman is the center of the aura of Darkness you noticed when the door opened - not that there was any real doubt of that - and that while she's not on the same tier as either of the Great Fairies you've met, she's easily head and shoulders above any of their kids. And while she is certainly Fae, at this range, the feel of her energies makes you think she's partly something else as well - something more purely Dark than the mingled essence of those mostly mortal members of the Winter Court you scried on the day you met Mrs. Lawson, something... monstrous.

Dark eyes look each member of your party over as they enter the room, and then, your hostess speaks - revealing a mix of straight white teeth and long, slender fangs.

"A young fairy with the air of a smith about him, an even younger fairy who must be his sister, and rather taller than I think she'd normally be, and a sorcerer wearing the form of a Goron, who fairly glows with the blessing of the Golden Goddesses," that smooth voice muses. "You certainly are keeping interesting company these days, Little Cat."

Cat wrinkles her nose at the "Bat Lady," but says nothing.

"Ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself." The Fae woman brings her long hands together before her chest, sharp nails on the ends of slender fingers not quite clacking, and bows her head - and in the same motion, causes what you mistook for a fuzzy black cape to twitch in a manner that reveals it to actually be a pair of fuzzy black wings, batlike in shape if not in proper placement. "A pleasure to meet you all. You may call me Vira."

"Erk," Briar chokes.

You almost do the same.

Vira. Vire-ah.

...suddenly, the vaguely Keese- and Ache-like appearances of some of the bats gathered outside make more sense.

The potentially part-Hyrulean bat monster lady smirks, and then gestures to the chairs and stool. "Please, have a seat. And tell me, how do you prefer your tea?"

Aside from explaining the accidental intrusion on her domain, is there anything in particular you want to discuss with Vira, Mistress of the Dark? (Hail!)

As everyone takes their seats and states their preference for tea-

"Milk," Cat says firmly.

"Just a little sugar, thank you," Robin states.

You and Briar both opt to take your tea as-is, at least for the first serving.

-the introductions are made.

There's a brief moment where you, Cat, and Robin end up speaking over each other and then trading glances, trying to sort out who should take the lead on this. On the one hand, Robin's the oldest, and has the most experience interacting with (other) Fae out of all of you. On the other hand, Cat is both a neighbor to and on a nickname basis with the Bat Lady. And then on the Mage Hand, there's you being the most powerful member of your little party, and having a certain "take charge" attitude in social gatherings besides.

After a few back-and-forth wordless exchanges, Cat gives everyone's names-

"Alex. Briar. Robin."

-in her usual laconic manner, and Robin follows up by explaining that your group has Lady Chloe's permission to mine the metal deposits in her domain, that you came to the cave to mine the Goddess copper, and how that turned into a spelunking expedition.

Your hostess takes that in, sipping at her own tea, and then lowers her cup and asks, "If you were concerned about the caves, why didn't you explore them ahead of time?"

You take over at that point. "THE LACK OF A PRIOR INVESTIGATION OF THE CAVE SYSTEM WAS AN OVERSIGHT ON MY PART, MA'AM," you admit. "IN MY DEFENSE, I AS YET LACK THE CAPABILITY TO VISIT FAERIE AT MY OWN CONVENIENCE, AND HAD ONLY A LIMITED TIME-FRAME IN WHICH TO INVESTIGATE QUITE A NUMBER OF ORE DEPOSITS. AS I WAS UNSURE WHICH, IF ANY OF THEM, WOULD BE OF THE QUALITY REQUIRED FOR ROBIN'S CURRENT PROJECT, THE EXTRA EFFORT OF EXPLORING EACH LOCATION IN-DEPTH SEEMED A LESS-THAN-PRODUCTIVE USE OF MY TIME. AND EVEN AFTER ROBIN HAD CONFIRMED THE VALUE OF THE LOCAL DEPOSIT, THIS WASN'T THE ONLY SITE THAT PROVED VIABLE; IF THE RECENT WEATHER DISTURBANCES HADN'T DISQUALIFIED SOME OF THE OTHER LOCATIONS, WE MIGHT NEVER HAVE TROUBLED YOU."

"Yes, that WAS an annoying development, wasn't it?" Vira muses sourly. "Bothersome Court lackeys and their histrionic tendencies..."

You hide a wince at your knowledge of what exactly PROVOKED the "lackey" in question into throwing a meteorological temper tantrum.