You can certainly appreciate the waste of knowledge and ability that Karl Goldschmidt's forcible recruitment by the Thule Society and subsequent death represents, as well as the sense of futility that hangs over the Ring of Fire Resistance and the forever-unfinished project it embodies. Under different circumstances, you might even feel contrite about your role in ensuring that a fellow item-crafter's work would never reach completion.
As it is, you really aren't bothered to learn that you wrecked ANOTHER of the Wandenreich's long-term projects.
Plucking the Goldschmidt Ring from the floor within the three-point circle of Goddess figurines, you return it to its original shelf, retrieve the Ring of Spell Storing, and set it in place to become the target of your next Vision.
Lines of epic poetry soon fill the pages of the Shadow Book, speaking of a warrior known as Wendel the Wrecker. Born some six centuries ago to a witch mother and a monstrous father, Wendel grew up shunned by his native village for his unnatural bloodline, which gave him fearsome strength, strange and often aggressive instincts, and an unsettling appearance. When the boy was fourteen, his father drove him out of his territory, forcing Wendel into a vagabond lifestyle that would last for decades to come.
Wendel's supernatural heritage not only helped him to stay alive during this period, but to thrive. He almost never went hungry, for he had the speed and endurance to run down most animals, the strength to catch and kill them, and the teeth, tongue, and stomach to safely digest pretty much anything organic. Sickness was unknown to him, injuries were rare and readily recovered from, and while never more than a minor mystical talent, he'd learned enough about magic from his mother to know how to avoid, treat, or confront various mystical dangers.
As for the more physical dangers a young half-human might run into, the same gifts that let Wendel run down deer and out-wrestle bears were quite useful in dealing with would-be thieves, rival monsters, and demonic predators. The young vagabond had learned enough from his sire about fighting to not just be a graceless brute as so many other young supernaturals were, and his mother's teachings were again useful in knowing how to identify, defeat, or simply survive assorted enemies. His title came out of a tendency to smash his opponents and himself into and through nearby buildings and small geographical features.
Not much detail is given about these "early years," except that they honed Wendel's abilities, gave him a lasting desire to travel the world over, visit strange lands, meet new beings, and then beat them up and take their stuff, and left a long, winding trail of casual devastation across three continents.
You can't say you don't see the appeal of certain aspects of such a lifestyle, but Wendel evidently kept this up until he was in his forties, and the only reason he started to slow down was because his personal growth had plateaued. He wasn't welcome anywhere he'd been before OR in most places that had only heard of him, and while this generally meant he could expect plenty of good fights, it also meant that few people were willing to help him when he needed it. Threats and bribery do not friends make, and without access to teachers or magical aid, Wendel's continued advancement of his skills slowed to a crawl.
Some would have taken the hint and given up their violent ways, or at least tried to be a little more considerate of their surroundings going forward. Wendel instead sought out a patron that would support his life of free-wheeling mayhem, going through a few employers - at least once very literally - before ultimately signing on with the Powers That Be.
Ambrose scoffs. "They just wanted a new leg-breaker."
Reading between the lines of verse, there WAS definitely some interest in the Wrecker for that reason, although you also get the impression that certain Powers were hoping to limit the overall damage the man did by aiming him at actually deserving targets.
Once established, this association continued down through all the years that followed. The Powers provided Wendel with resources that he couldn't otherwise obtain, allowing him to renew his stalled-out development, and in return he let them send him to new places to break specific faces, bones, objects, and/or structures. Simply getting the means to travel the planes made the entire deal worth it to the monster-man, as there were far more numerous and diverse opponents to be found in the far-flung reaches of the multiverse than Earth alone could provide, and the vast majority of them had never even heard of him!
The Vision glosses over the centuries of mayhem that followed, noting in passing that Wendel acquired the Ring of Spell Storing from one of the "bones" he broke during that period, and mostly used it to keep two or three handy spells at the ready so that he could invoke them in the middle of a brawl.
Not quite fifty years ago, the Wrecker was called back to Earth and dispatched to deal with a Wandenreich field team that was digging into an ancient ruin in South America that the Powers wanted left alone. Wendel had not been their first choice to send, for fear that his destructive tendencies would simply level the pile of stones and unleash the demon sealed within, but prior agents and gentler methods had failed to dissuade the Quincy, and the Powers could foresee that they were running out of time to stop the demon from being released.
To be fair to the Wandenreich, they'd meant to destroy the thing, but after translating warnings of an "unseen devourer of minds and souls," they'd thought they were dealing with a Hollow. Instead, the creature was some kind of slime capable of breaking off bits of itself to infest living bodies, which it would take control of, gradually mutate, and ultimately devour from within.
Charming.
Wendel arrived at the site in time to stop the Quincy from breaking through the last of the seals and even managed to do so without shattering the wards himself. Unfortunately, his opponents had called for reinforcements, Silbern's response was to dispatch a Sternritter, and the Wrecker was perfectly happy to engage this new and powerful opponent.
The seal didn't survive the ensuing fight, and the two warriors shortly found themselves being attacked by Quincy bodies that were being puppeted by the demon. A wiser creature would have taken the opportunity to flee in secrecy, but centuries of isolation and deprivation had driven the slime-creature mad, and desperation drove it to attack the nearest sources of food.
Between them, the Star Knight and the Powers' agent destroyed the abomination, but Wendel trusted too much to his physical resilience and allowed some of the thing's "splattered" substance to get on and then into his body. Weakened by its madness, hunger, and wounds, this fragment of the devourer could not control the Wrecker outright, but its attempts to do so and his body's attempts to fight it off left the warrior all but paralyzed, and thus at the mercy of the Sternritter - who had little reason to show any, if the result would be the slime gaining control of a host body so formidable to begin with.
And so, Wendel the Wrecker was erased from the world by a sustained barrage of Quincy arrows. The Ring of Spell Storing was one of a few of his possessions that survived and was taken to Silbern as a memento of the battle. Wendel had expended the magic contained within the item, and the Quincy never identified its proper use.
In any case, while the Ring of Spell Storing certainly has its uses, you aren't convinced that said uses are worth the cost of the item - at least not under the terms for the division of the Silbern treasure. So, you return it to its stand as well.
The loose association of divine and demonic entities known collectively as the Powers That Be is a topic you've talked about with Ambrose and Balthazar in the past - the wizard had a good rant on the subject one time - and it's been made fairly clear to you that the group is too large, too diverse, and pursuing too many different agendas for most general statements to apply to the entire organization. At least, beyond their dedication to the status quo and incessant meddling in the name of maintaining it.
That said, you've never discussed the Powers with Urahara, so you decide to take the opportunity to inquire if there's anything he knows about them that he thinks you might need to.
"Nothing that comes to mind," he replies. "The Soul Society is a signatory to the Powers' treaties and agreements, but there isn't a lot of formal contact - and when there is, it's typically through the Noble Families or the Shinto pantheon. Mostly, the Powers and their agents stay out of Japan, and in return, the Shinigami don't go wandering."
Nothing revelatory, then.
Your next stop is Ambrose's improvised arsenal, specifically the part of it where he's got the weapons stashed.
You're no sooner inside the room than you start looking through and past all the sharp, pointy, and/or smashy things for a pair of revolvers. It takes a few moments, but you find them in their holsters and the attached belt, hanging neatly from a display. As Ambrose mentioned earlier, the guns aren't enchanted and don't appear to have soaked up enough supernatural energy to have developed any sort of power that way; they do have enough of a presence that you could take a Literary Vision off of them, but as this would just repeat the Legend of Lake the Demon-Hunting Cowboy, you're not particularly inclined to.
"So, Ambrose," you begin. "Earlier, you said Mr. Drake wasn't thrilled with the idea of handing these over, unless he was sure I knew how to handle them safely. Did he specify any terms?"
"He had three conditions," the wizard replies. "First, seeing as how neither of us could actually recall you ever mentioning that you'd used a gun before, he wanted to be clear that you actually knew what to do with one, particularly of this model, and how."
That much is fair. Lu-sensei drilled you pretty hard on sword-forms back when you first acquired the Blessed Blade, specifically to make sure you weren't going to hurt yourself with it.
"Second," Ambrose continues, "he wanted to be clear that you had a place to properly store and actually perform maintenance on the thing, where it wouldn't be at risk of being picked up by your adorable little sister, your friends, or anyone else that really shouldn't be able to lay their hands on it."
That is also fair.
"And third," the wizard says, building to his conclusion, "after your Shadow and his elemental kindergarten managed to go through a crate's worth of grenades - even if it was in service to a good cause and our personal enrichment - Arthur felt it would be a good idea for you to have an idea of just how much modern personal weapons and ammunition actually cost."
That is... actually, hang on a second.
"What IS the cost of a grenade, anyway?" you wonder.
"Those particular ones cost about twenty-five dollars apiece," Ambrose answers, quickly enough that you suspect he looked the information up beforehand. "Or rather, that's what the military pays for them. Arthur doesn't get as good a deal, since even with all the lads and lasses around here eager to blow things up, he still doesn't need to buy in bulk, but he usually pays somewhere between ten and twenty percent extra."
...
So, you blew through somewhere between twelve and fifteen hundred dollars of high explosives in an afternoon?
"Something like it, yes."
Okay, yeah, you're starting to see why Arthur might have had a fiscal concern on top of the ones about safety.
(Sort of) Gained Lake's Guns
"Just for the record, Ambrose? I know a spell that can grant proficiency with firearms."
"Somehow, this fails to surprise me," Ambrose replies dryly. "Have you tested it?"
"Yes. If you remember that one Trial where different versions of me came out of the BIG mirror-"
He nods, as does Balthazar. Urahara just looks curious.
"-that was based on a previous test that Briar's mother put us through. I used the Spell to Bestow Weapon Proficiency to allow the ordinary nine-year-old Other Me to use a gun to defend himself against some Evil Dead impersonators we ended up fighting."
"'Evil Dead'?" the technically dead man in the room wonders aloud.
Balthazar, on the other hand, has a shrewd look on his face. "You used the same spell that you cast to bring Lily Blaisdell's shotgun to her to arm him, didn't you?"
Good guess, and good memory. "I did. I should also note that I haven't tested how many different kinds of firearms or other modern weapons the Spell to Summon a Weapon can access; I just know for sure that it works on shotguns."
"'This is my boomstick'," Blake says with a smirk.
He gets it.
"It occurs to me that Arthur may have overlooked or forgotten that in his parental concern," Ambrose muses. Then he grins. "Should be fun to see the look on his face when he finds out!"
With that out of the way, you turn to the other weapons in the room.
Ambrose mentioned a set of daggers - and some armor - that belonged to La Renarde, and you soon find them. The blades number seven in total, four of which are a matched set that are designed to be thrown and enchanted to return to their owner.
"It's a neat bit of work," the wizard expounds. "Most weapons of that nature return to the LOCATION from which they were thrown, so if the owner has had to move since tossing their weapon away, the blade or what have you ends up falling on the ground instead of neatly back in your grasp. There are weapons that properly return to their owners, but the spells required for those are either slow-acting or potent and expensive. Whoever our lady thief got her tools from thought to enhance the SHEATHS as well as the blades, linking them together so that each dagger will track and return to its matching sheath after striking something."
Huh. That is pretty neat. Useful, too, if La Renarde was the sort of fighter who preferred to stay on the move in combat.
Aside from the flying blade trick, these four weapons have the standard enhancements for increased accuracy, cutting power, and durability. There is also one other magic worked into them, whose aura matches to... healing magic? Really?
"That particular matrix is designed to render blows from the weapon nonlethal, or as close to it as a sharp and pointy bit of metal can get," Ambrose says. "Not something you see in a warrior's toolkit very often, but La Renarde WAS a thief in the modern age; decent odds she was trying to avoid murder charges."
Okay, you can see that.
The fifth dagger is a bit longer and wider in the blade than the first set, with greater weight and a different balance. It could still be thrown well enough, it's just not optimized for it, being more intended for hand-to-hand work. Once again, you detect the basic enhancements and that matrix of non-lethality, and once again, there is a third magic worked into the blade, something that kind of feels like it wants to bite you - but only playfully? Mostly?
"A bane weapon attuned to humans," Balthazar observes. "Usually a nasty piece of work, but combined with the merciful enhancement, it'll make the blade hit four times as hard as it otherwise would, without drawing much blood, if any. That would put even the hardiest and best trained security guards down VERY quickly."
"Particularly if the lady in question managed to sneak up on them," Ambrose adds. "And of course, she could always will the blade to stop playing nice..."
Incidentally, this weapon doesn't have an enchanted sheath. It does, however, have a name.
The sixth of La Renarde's daggers is almost identical to the Kiss, save that it hasn't been enchanted to "bite" humans. Instead, you think it would find a fair number of monsters to be more to its tastes - although not all of them, by any means.
Finally, there is a blade of similar physical design as the previous pair, but which lacks the nonlethal option and instead catches fire on command. The sense that it wants to bite something is NOT playful, but, seeing as how it's clearly aimed at the undead, you don't really have an issue with that.
Incidentally, La Renarde's armor is fairly plain leather with straightforward defensive boosts. Ambrose mentions that it has a glamor to allow it to pass notice as ordinary clothing, but that's all.
You're actually not terrible at using throwing weapons, and the combined concealability and returning function of La Renarde's ranged weaponry gives them a fair amount of utility. Being non-lethal is an interesting bonus which is actually pretty practical for you, as it would let you use these weapons in sparring matches - and maybe even in competition - with a lot less worry about hurting someone.
And of course, you can study those enchantments. A weapon that you've dropped or thrown away coming back to you on its own has some real potential all by itself, though it does depend a bit on how that works...
Just to be sure, you take one of the scabbards and hang it - a little awkwardly, admittedly - off one of the belt loops on your pants. Then, standing clear of and facing away from everyone else in the room, you draw the blade and give it a toss at the wall, deliberately tilting the shot so that the dagger will hit hilt first.
There is a faint whisper as the blade spins through the air, but your aim is good, and no sooner has the butt of the blade bounced off the wall than the weapon spins around and accelerates in your direction, swinging about so that it's coming at you hilt first and angled down towards the sheath. Only when it's just inches from the leather cover does the flying dagger rotate into position to slide safely home, keeping the flat of its blade turned towards you as much as possible.
How thoughtful.
Gained La Renarde's Daggers of Returning (and Sheaths of Catching)
Built-in safety precautions or no, with four separate blades to keep track of and the possibility of outrunning the Daggers when you're zipping around at Ki Enhanced and Body Flickering speeds, you're definitely going to want to practice with these before you use them seriously.
Like with the Daggers, a non-lethal weapon gives you some nice training options, though the fact that it will hit a lot harder against human opponents is, perhaps, a bit too advantageous for friendly matches with Lu-sensei's other students.
Well, except for Cousin Briar.
Gained the Goodnight Kiss
Third verse, same as the first.
Gained the Playful Nip
Though THIS blade, you CAN use against humans without too much issue.
As for this one, while you already have numerous means of setting corpse-demons and other undead offenders on fire, you won't say no to adding another option!
Gained the Late Arrival
You've taken everything else that once belonged to the lady thief, so you figure you might as well complete the set.
Gained La Renarde's Glamered Armor
Besides, while it's only about as protective as your Warmage's Robe and not quite ideal wear for when you're casting spells or performing martial arts techniques, the Illusion Magic woven into this suit gives you the option of wearing it in plain sight without most people or things being any the wiser. That could come in handy.
With the guns and the thief's gear handled and no sign of the Mask of Vulcan - perhaps it's in the room where the bulk of the armor was moved? - you move on to the stuff in the armory that you don't have any pre-existing information about.
There are quite a few entry-level enchanted weapons of various types from all over the world, ranging from knives and fighting sticks to longswords and polearms. None of them particularly catch your eye, about a third show the same signs of over-exertion that was present on so many of the pieces of defensive equipment you've previously inspected, and there's some damaged examples as well...
Of rather more interest is the spear that's been placed in a stand that was given more space around it than any other single item in the room, not unlike the chamber of cursed items you visited earlier. In this case, the extra distance put between the spear wasn't because of any malicious energies within or upon the weapon, but simply because the thing literally crackles with power - Elemental Lightning, to be precise, blue-white tongues of which periodically snap, pop, and crawl their way along the exterior. Also of note about the electrified spear is that it is visibly cracked in several places, the haft speckled with burn marks and the head chipped besides.
"Is it supposed to do that or is it happening because of the damage?" you inquire.
"I think it's the latter," Balthazar offers.
"But knowing how warriors love to show off, it could be either," Ambrose adds.
"Could be both," Urahara offers.
Occupying a different spot on the elemental wheel is a war axe whose single, surprisingly modest-sized hooked head is wreathed by a faint mist, thanks to the aura of Ice Magic running through the metal.
As you step forward to take a closer look, Briar shifts on your shoulder as if leaning away from the thing.
"Problem, partner?"
"Two- no, make that three problems."
You frown. "What's the first?"
"Well, for one, I'm pretty sure that's the anti-Fae version of the lady thief's close-fighting blades."
...concerning.
"Second, I'm also pretty sure that it's made of cold iron."
Well, yes, the Ice Magic would- oooh.
"And the third problem is the pun," you conclude.
"Exactly."
Well then.
"Planning on setting up your own armory, lad?" Ambrose asks, as you start marking out which weapons you'll be taking.
"Maybe not with all of them," you admit, testing the weight of one blade. "I'll probably end up disenchanting some of these and using a few more as raw materials for my crafting projects."
The wizard and the sorcerer both nod.
"Still," you add, "having one decent magic weapon for each of my immediate family and friends who live nearby, whether as gifts meant for personal and regular use or as part of a stockpile in case of emergencies, seems like a reasonable goal to shoot for."
"Define 'decent'," Balthazar says.
As you pick up one of the remaining items, one of those ring-headed staves that you've seen associated with Buddhist monks, you frown - not at the damaged state of the staff or its enhancements, but at the fact that said empowering energies are based on spiritual energy. Leaving aside the Quincy-made pieces, this is one of the few examples of a spiritually empowered magic item that you've seen here, with the bulk of the ones you've looked through having been enchanted according to various arcane traditions or empowered with divine assistance.
Why ARE there so few spiritual items in a pile of plunder pulled from the private stash of a veritable society of spiritual power users?
When you pose the question, it's Urahara who answers. "It may have something to do with the fact that spiritually empowered items of other human traditions would have been relatively easy for the Wandenreich to understand, adapt to, and use for their own purposes. If all else failed, they could always break them down into spiritual particles for extra firepower."
You frown. "Would they have done that to things they'd collected like this?"
"Probably not to items given to them as tokens of friendship or gratitude," the shopkeeper replies. "But I have to imagine that a lot of spiritually aware humans who saw what a Quincy could do made a point of staying out of their way as much as possible."
Gained Enchanted Arms
When you set the Goddess figurines down on the floor around the sparking spear, they're a bit further away from it than they were from the other items you've performed Literary Visions on, mainly because you'd rather not get shocked.
Bracing yourself to dodge if your magic provokes an electrical reaction, you cast the spell once again.
*Crackle*
You twitch, but no shocking ensues.
As for your Book, it tells you of a fellow American sorcerer who first became aware of his powers in the 1970s, after he was struck by a lightning bolt as a young teenager.
...ow.
"Does that sort of thing happen often, with sorcerers?" Urahara ventures.
"Traumatic awakenings are a well-documented phenomenon," Balthazar answers with a sigh. "And they ALWAYS leave some kind of mark on the individual and their magic. In this case, I'm guessing our spear-wielder's primary talents were electrical in nature?"
Electrical and sonic, yes, to the point where he started calling himself Bronte, which means "thunder" in Greek and is (more or less) the name of two mythological figures: Bronte, the goddess of thunder and a member of Zeus's entourage alongside her sister Astrape, goddess of lightning; and Brontes, one of the three Cyclops who forged the thunderbolt of Zeus.
"And taking the name of some mytho-historical figure whose attributes are vaguely similar to your powers is ALSO well-documented," the Merlinean Master grumbles. "As are periodic smitings by gods that take offense, although those have gotten fairly rare..."
"One part of the Powers' injunction I actually DON'T entirely hate," Ambrose admits.
Prior to his empowerment, Brontes had led a thoroughly mundane existence in a small town that sounds like it was everything Sunnydale purports to be - which is to say, a perfectly normal and friendly community where nothing out of the ordinary ever happened, and certainly nothing supernatural. As a result, the boy had nowhere and no one to turn to for answers about his strange abilities or guidance in how to use them, leaving him to come up with his own answers.
Unfortunately, the power went to the boy's head, and his hometown subsequently suffered a year-long crime spree that saw widespread vandalism, every major business in town being robbed, a dozen hospitalizations for injuries that might have been caused by moderate electrical discharges and small explosions, and a number of witnesses to these and other crimes who were too scared to talk - though eventually, someone found their courage. This led to a confrontation with the local sheriff that saw a hole blown through the roof of Brontes' parents' house, the sheriff, his deputy, and Brontes' father in the hospital with serious injuries, and Brontes himself skipping town with his father's stolen car.
Your spell doesn't reveal precisely what happened next, only stating that the young storm-born sorcerer became a wandering menace, drifting between small towns in numerous states and taking from them whatever he wanted. Mundane security systems of the time weren't sufficient to stop him, and while typical magical defenses proved effective at thwarting subtle thefts, Brontes eventually mastered the Spell to Create a Lightning Bolt and other destructive magics that weren't so easily turned aside. Although law enforcement was looking for him, Brontes had found ways to disguise himself magically, and his increased delving into magic eventually caused his "normal" appearance to change quite significantly.
As for the various supernatural enforcers the young vagabond encountered, it was their influence that led to him adopting the use of this spear. After a couple of close calls proved that a sorcerer's power did not make him almighty - especially not if something fast and/or tough could get in close - Brontes looked into weapons that would allow him to keep enemies at a distance. Since his aptitude for electrical magic meant that guns were a little too likely to blow up on him, he turned to older weapons, eventually finding and developing a natural - or perhaps supernatural - aptitude for the spear. Brontes would eventually take inspiration from one of his mythological namesakes and forge his own "Thunderbolt."
Brontes spent seven years getting into trouble all across the States, eventually offending the Wandenreich enough that they hunted him down, putting an end to his life and his legend in New York in the summer of 1986.
Gained Brontes' Thunderbolt
You look at Balthazar. "You never heard of this guy?"
Blake shakes his head. "He doesn't ring any bells."
"Thinking about the corpse-demon population, eh?" Ambrose guesses.
You can only nod. The parasites are the most common threat to your family and friends in Sunnydale, and one of the traits that makes them so is the fact that mundane physical force isn't as effective against them as it would be against a lot of other things. Some of that is down to their demonic nature - demons in general being rather hardy - and some of it comes from the fact that an undead body doesn't actually NEED most of its organs or other bits intact for it to keep going, but either way, a blood-rat can soak up a lot more punishment while still remaining functional than most humans could.
The basic enhancements that have been applied to this bunch of weapons aren't enough to overcome that defense, which makes them less than ideal for your needs. If there was a silver blade in the collection, that would be a different matter - and it would work well against weres, too - but as it is...
You set up your circle of ivory around the haft of the axe, making sure to keep the shoulder Briar is perched on turned away from the weapon. Once you're set, you back up to a comfortable distance before invoking your spell.
This time, the words of the Literary Vision reach back quite a bit further than most of your previous attempts, describing a Scandinavian man by the name of Alfred Ingolfson, who was born at some point in the Tenth Century.
"No byname?" Balathazar asks.
"A what, now?"
This leads into a brief explanation of Norse naming practices. While they did use patronyms and matronyms, these weren't typically used in the manner that modern surnames are - instead, there would be a third name, the byname, which either described the location where they lived or some personal trait. For the man you're reading about to only use two names is by no means unheard of, but still somewhat unusual.
Another oddity of his name is that Alfred is of Old English origins, with the meaning of "elf counsel." It turns out there's a very good reason for that, as the man was born with the assistance of an "elf" - which is to say, one of the Fair Folk-
"Uh-oh," several people in the room say at once.
-specifically, a member of the Winter Court.
Ambrose and Balthazar wince.
Evidently, when Alfred's mother went into labor one winter evening, her husband was forced to venture out into a blizzard to fetch the local midwife, only to become lost in the storm and encounter the Fae lady. Amused to see a human stumbling around blind and a bit baffled as to why he would be so daft, the otherworldly woman inquired after his business, learned of the impending birth, and realized that she'd never seen a human being born before. Thus, she cast a glamor to make herself appear to be the midwife and had the father-to-be lead her back to his residence to appease her curiosity.
After all, with how many humans there were in the world, this "labor" business couldn't be all that complicated, now could it?
"Ye gods and demons and small creeping things," Ambrose exclaims with slow but honest amazement. "I do believe that I'm actually feeling sorry for one of the cold wenches..."
It turned out that, yes, delivering a baby absolutely COULD be that complicated, and as a consequence, not all of the female screaming that filled that night belonged to Alfred's mother. Possibly not even half.
Fortunately, this wasn't the human woman's first delivery - she'd already been a mother of three - so between prior experience, shouted instructions, and a whole lot of magical cheating, everyone involved came through the night alive.
On the upside, young Alfred got his name and a Faerie godmother out of the whole deal, and a weirdly helpful one at that. "Auntie Alva" would pop up regularly throughout Alfred's childhood and adolescent years, never directly helping him with anything-
"Because that would be beneath the dignity of a lady of the Courts," Ambrose drawls.
"And against Winter's ethos," Balthazar adds.
-but dropping little stories and riddles and the occasional outright hint that suggested what he should or shouldn't do in various situations, so as not to embarrass his parents, his ancestors, or her by getting himself killed stupidly or easily.
This is how Alfred first came to possess an axe of cold iron, a costly enough thing even with no magic bound to its blade.
As to how that magic came to be...
As a lady of one of the Faerie Courts, and of Winter in particular, Alfred's godmother naturally had rivals, enemies, wary superiors, and ambitious inferiors who kept an eye on her comings and goings - just as she did on theirs. While Alva made every effort to escape their notice - just as they did HERS - eventually one of these, the Lady Hellebore, discovered that Alva was spending an unusual amount of time interacting with and watching over one human.
Fortunately for Alfred, the lady in question was a rival of his honorary aunt's, which set certain limits on her ability to act and the form those actions could take. Rivalry, after all, implies a certain parity between the parties involved, neither side having an insurmountable advantage over the other - as a superior would - or being willing to resort to self-destructive measures for the sake of victory - as an enemy would.
UNfortunately for Alfred, Hellebore WAS a peer of his Faerie godmother's, meaning that she was every bit as powerful and creative, and could get away with things that Alva wouldn't have tolerated from an enemy or an inferior.
Spiriting the warrior away to Faerie was one of those things, not the least because Alva had told Alfred enough of the place for him to survive there - a double-edged blade, to be sure, since it would allow her rival to divert blame if anything happened to the human, but a better defense than ignorance of the place and its denizens.
In any case, when Alfred found himself in unfamiliar terrain where some of the animals spoke, trees could walk, and the world around him did not seem entirely real, he recalled every tale and trick his godmother had ever mentioned in his hearing and set about the business of keeping himself alive, sane, and out of debt. This involved no small amount of axe-work, whether to gain food or avoid becoming it.
Through strength, cunning, and a fair bit of luck, Alfred eventually made his way to the Lady Hellebore's residence, where he was invited to stay - and then wisely and politely turned down the open-ended offer of sanctuary, instead negotiating for a single night's shelter and some equivalent service he might render in return. Not having expected this astuteness even after watching the warrior outwit several of the lesser creatures of her domain, the Fae lady was intrigued enough to agree to the exchange, and directed Ingolfson to deal with some "minor pests" that had been raiding her flowerbeds.
Some warriors might have decried gardening duties as beneath their dignity; Alfred simply agreed to the task and spent the next day battling a drove of worryingly large, aggressive, and omnivorous Winter hares.
Then he bargained for another night's shelter, and spent the following day fishing a Fae eel out of Lady Hellebore's iced-over moat.
The day after THAT involved tracking down a rogue Faerie hound, a beast at least half-wolf.
And so it went for a month, with Alfred working his way through ever more dangerous Faerie creatures and gaining more of his hostess's interest. Some others within her hall - especially Lady Hellebore's fiance - grew weary of the human's presence and took to challenging him to contests of storytelling, song, and riddling, and when these tests failed to remove the unsightly brute from their midst, they arranged for Lady Alva to be invited to the next evening's feast, in the hope that she would finally take Alfred away.
Instead, Lady Alva took in everything that was going on and backhandedly complimented Alfred on managing not to make a complete hash of his attempts to woo a lady of the Court.
Ambrose laughs at that, just one, "Ha!" of amusement.
The Fae lordling immediately challenged Alfred to a duel for Hellebore's hand, and lost fight and hand - as well as his OWN hand - in short order. Alva then continued to stir the pot by declaring that by the terms of the wager, Alfred was now rightfully Lady Hellebore's fiance.
The wizard is now laughing in earnest.
The only objection that the lady of the house expressed to this was an abject refusal to have Alva for a (god)mother-in-law, and at that point, her former fiance quite lost his head: first figuratively, in an enraged and ill-advised attempt on Alfred's life; and then very literally, as the axe-wielder did what axe-wielders occasionally do to their enemies. The cold iron blade had already absorbed a certain amount of power from the beasts that Alfred had battled over the previous month, but the execution of a lord of the Fair Folk who had been in violation of guest-right was what imbued it with the essence of Winter that it now bears.
As for the Fae-bane property, that settled in over the next year, as Alfred undertook further quests at the behest of his blushing bride-to-be. For a full year and a day he roamed the lands of Winter, facing down ever more dangerous trials to prove himself worthy to wed one of Winter's own - but mostly to get Hellebore to concede to having Alva for an in-law. Of sorts.
Once the pair were finally married, Lady Alva unveiled her wedding gift - a spell that tied the happy couple's lives together in literal fashion, so that as long as Lady Hellebore lived, so too would Alfred. Seeing the boy she had brought into the world live as long as one of her own people would satisfy her, the Faerie godmother declared, not the least because she would be able to call Hellebore her daughter-in-law the whole time.
And so, Alfred Ingolfson lived for a very long time, taking no byname so as to avoid giving the impression that he claimed any part of Faerie for his own or signal his Fae neighbors that he considered some aspect of himself to be a particular virtue - and thus a target to be undermined at any opportunity.
"Ah," several people in the room exclaim at once, as enlightenment dawns.
The remaining paragraphs of this tale cover how Alfred Ingolfson's Faerie-killing axe ended up in the hands of the Wandenreich. It seems that the weapon was stolen from its master in 1307, as part of one more scheme in the endless ebb and flow of plots and plans and betrayals that dominate the environment of the Courts. Exactly what the goal was, your Shadow Book does not reveal, for the actual thief had only been informed of their role in the game - this being to get the axe out of Hellebore's domain and to a certain location on Earth.
The Faerie thief succeeded in his task... and then nothing seems to have happened for most of a century, until the axe was discovered by a frost giant. While not so large or mighty a creature as his forebears who once battled with the gods, the giant was still large enough that a weapon meant for a human to use with two hands made a decent fit in just one of his own; moreover, he was quite pleased by the axe's frigid bite, and so claimed it for himself. This giant would use the weapon for several decades before falling in battle, at which point the axe passed into the hands of his killers.
This cycle repeated a few times, with most of the blade's bearers not being noteworthy enough to get more than a passing mention by your spell and several decades-long periods where it was locked away in some tomb or collection, but at last Alfred's axe found its way into the possession of a cold-loving demon that used it to spread further chaos and death during the years of 1815 and 1816. The demon in question crossed paths with a Wandenreich team, who didn't hesitate to put it down and take the "frost demon's axe" back to Silbern. It remained there ever since.
Well, then.
And has what you've learned changed your intentions for the Axe of Alfred Ingolfson?
You do have a passing thought that Alfred's story is a perfect example of Faerie lore being a useful survival skill, but you're pretty sure that this point was already well-known to most of the people in the room, and that Urahara has undoubtedly reached a similar conclusion on his own after hearing the story. With that in mind, you don't see a need to bring it up.
Given that the Viking who married a Lady of Winter might still be alive, you're inclined not to do anything potentially permanent to his axe - at least not until you have a chance to figure out what Alfred Ingolfson's current status is and whether or not he might want his old weapon back.
But non-permanent stuff like analysis is definitely still on the table.
Gained Cold Iron
As you resume your search through the racks of weapons, your spiritual senses alert you to the presence of an aura of divine magic. The source turns out to be a Western-style sword not entirely dissimilar to your own Blessed Blade in its general physical construction, albeit with a lot of the finer details being different. Now that you're looking at it closely, you can tell that the blade is sanctified, but it's also been... not tainted, but exposed to and then purged of enough demonic energy that it's left a permanent mark on the weapon.
In a GOOD way, mind you. It's still a long way from being the local version of the Master Sword, but you suspect it would kill demons very well all the same.
Next on the lot is a curved blade that might have come from the Middle East, or maybe a bit further into Asia. Neither overflowing with goodness nor whispering of evil, its aura instead speaks of hot, dry winds and cold, dry nights in a way that makes part of your soul ache with familiarity, even though the style of the weapon isn't Gerudo.
Then there's a heavy mace that measures about two and a half feet long from the butt of the handle to the top of the flanged head. At first glance, the design looks to be about as plain as a magic weapon can be, while still being of the necessary material quality and workmanship to hold an enchantment, but when you look a bit closer, you realize that the head isn't made of metal, nor has it been "attached" to the haft - instead, it's all one piece of wood. Combine that with the complete lack of tool marks and the aura of wild spiritual energy running through the thing...
"Did a druid make this?" you ask aloud.
"Looks and feels like it," Briar agrees. "I wonder what they were trying to break?"
"Break" is definitely the right word for it, because the aura emanating from the wooden mace - or maybe it's just an oddly shaped club? - manages to feel destructive without being bloodthirsty.
While a certain part of you is a little leery of having anything to do with any demon-slaying holy swords, even that bit would prefer to know where this weapon came from and what it's been used for in the past. Once again, you set up for your spell - after first sending Shadow Alex off to conjure another Shadow Book, and maybe some more incense.
"You really think you'll need that much of the stuff?" he wonders, looking at the still mostly full box.
"Better safe than sorry, right?"
"Eh, fine. I suppose it's not like I'm really LOSING anything, long-term..."
As for the sword, its history begins in 1225, when it was forged in anticipation of the then-upcoming Sixth Crusade, but the battles it was expected to be wielded in never emerged - at least not for the unnamed knight and minor noble of the Holy Roman Empire who carried the weapon.
"There was some fighting, but the Sixth Crusade owed the majority of its success to diplomatic maneuvers rather than military ones," Balthazar recounts.
Instead of shedding the blood of heretics, the sword first saw use slaying a relatively minor demon that its bearer encountered while on Crusade. The encounter isn't described in detail, apparently having been mentioned only because it prompted that knight to begin a family tradition of demon-hunting, which he and his heirs would pursue for the next two centuries. In that time, the sword was tainted, purified, broken, reforged, befouled again and cleansed anew, and all the while steadily empowered as it killed more and more of the "spawn of Hell" - a few examples of which the terms of your spell did find worthy of inclusion.
Where the founder spent months away from home each year in search of unholy things to smite in the name of God, his descendants took what may have been a more practical approach, using information passed to them by the Church, fellow knights, and other sources to identify likely cases of demonic activity and THEN riding out. The practice was somewhere between family tradition and religious obligation, with a dash of professional venture thanks to the occasional treasure that turned up in the possession of this corrupted sorcerer, cult of demon-worshippers, or abomination with an eye for shiny things, all of which kept the various knights well-motivated to uphold the practice.
Eventually, however, the passage of time took its toll. Here and there, a member of the bloodline would suffer crippling wounds, be afflicted by poison or curse or foul sickness, or simply die; now and then, one's resolve would be shattered by witnessing too much horror and despair; and knowledge of these and other consequences deterred more than one of the family's sons from hunting the darkness or even taking up the blade at all. The lineage turned out fewer and fewer hunters and focused more and more on their mundane duties to lord and land, and the sanctified sword languished on a wall or in a display case for years and even decades at a time before being taken up by some wide-eyed, wondering child or desperately determined soul.
Some of those did well for themselves. Others... did not, and some did TOO well, inviting consequences upon themselves and their relatives.
Such a case occurred in 1760, when a latter-day knight wielded the family sword and destroyed a local cult, only to discover that it had been but one branch of a much larger organization - one which took revenge by assailing the family residence. Where a family of warriors with experience facing the supernatural might have turned back the assault of screaming fanatics and their handful of minor demonic allies in good order, a family composed mostly of civilians and a couple of mundane soldiers was an entirely different matter. They still gave an accounting of themselves, but in the end, the knight and his infant daughter were the only survivors.
More than slightly mad with grief, guilt, and the pain of the wounds that prevented him from hunting down those that had been behind the attack, the knight devoted all of his efforts, wealth, and remaining life to the task of shaping his daughter into an instrument of revenge - and as part of that, he named her Olga.
"...I don't get it," you admit.
"Saint Olga is the Patron Saint of Vengeance," Balthazar advises you.
...
"There's a SAINT for that?" you ask with some amazement.
"She converted to Christianity later in life and is considered one of the founders of the Russian Orthodox Church," the older sorcerer explains. "The vengeance bit is for what she did to the people who murdered her husband, but I probably shouldn't go into detail, it's getting close to lunchtime."
It's still a few hours shy of being time for breakfast back in Sunnydale, but you could eat a light lunch if one's in the offering. With that in mind, you decide not to risk it.
Getting back to the tale, you learn that Olga's father chose to raise her in isolation, interacting with only himself, three servants (the only surviving members of the family's household staff), and the local priest. This began as a desperate but well-intentioned attempt to keep the girl safely hidden from the surviving branches of the cult, who might be content to let a crippled enemy live and suffer from his losses, but who would almost certainly take further action if they became aware that his daughter still lived. Despite that, the practice gradually evolved into a means for the increasingly obsessed and unhinged knight to better control his daughter and shape her into the successor and weapon that he wanted.
Such an upbringing should have sabotaged Olga's development in any number of ways, from the emotional and the mental to the physical, but fortunately, the girl's other caretakers did everything they could to make up for the normal lifestyle that her father's legitimate security concerns and more questionable and excessive measures denied her. Consequently, when she finally left her father's house at fifteen - not long after the man himself had died, his old wounds and worsening mental state finally carrying him off - she was deemed no worse than sheltered and odd by the standards of the time, as opposed to somehow deranged.
At least until somebody saw her fighting a demon, a monster, or humans engaged in supernatural wickedness. Then she went from a cheerful, affably quirky young girl to a cold, merciless killing machine that could walk through a band of vampires and leave only blazing ash in her wake - a somewhat garbled description of just such an incident made it to the Watchers' Council and led to their mistaking Olga for the newest Slayer, at least until word reached them that the "previous" Slayer was still alive and well, if a bit annoyed to learn about some "imposter."
The result of that assumption was a three-part pursuit across Europe, Northern Africa, and the Near East that lasted most of two years, with Olga and her small band of allies hunting the cult, the cult hunting Olga's people, and the Watchers pursuing the other parties to try and get some answers.
"They didn't send the Slayer?" Ambrose wonders.
"If I'm following the dates right," Balthazar says, glancing at your Book, "the American Revolutionary War would have been in progress at the time. Keeping an eye on that and making sure the Colonies weren't cheating with demonic help was probably a consideration."
"Hm, point."
The Council DID eventually make contact with Olga and were apparently relieved to learn that she wasn't actually the "avenging angel" that some of the stories painted her as, just a young woman with a holy sword, a righteous cause to wield it in, and the skill, luck, and good taste in companions to have survived as long as she had. Some agreements were made, and then the Watchers got out of the way and let Olga continue with her quest.
The Wandenreich's involvement with the lady knight came about in 1778, when Olga and her allies raided one cult base and happened to rescue a young Soldat whose squad had badly underestimated the threat that "ordinary" humans could pose to the spiritually empowered. One of two members of his five-man squad to survive that mistake, his remaining partner returned to Silbern to report on events while he stayed with Olga's band, partly to serve as a point of contact for whatever official response their superiors decided on, partly to assist in hunting down and destroying the cult, and partly because he was more than a little charmed by a pretty girl who wrought bloody havoc on the monsters in human skin that had tortured and murdered three of his fellows.
In the latter two respects, the Quincy was in good company, as most of Olga's companions had joined her for similar reasons, and three of the others still held serious romantic interest in her. Unfortunately for the other lads, Olga's upbringing had left her a bit blind to signals of romantic interest or intent, and ignorant of the customs for such things. By the time she'd worked out that some of her friends were interested in her as more than just a sister-in-arms or good friend, she'd already fitted them into the category of friends or even family, which made the prospect of courtship with any of them somewhat uncomfortable to consider. It didn't help that she wasn't entirely sure what she would do with her life after completing the quest her father had given her, assuming she even made it that far.
Enter a fresh face who was not only clearly interested in her, but powerful enough to keep up when it came to unleashing divine retribution on the unholy, had none of her other companions' initial hang-ups about being saved by a woman or women being able to fight, AND came from a society that was waging a centuries-long war against soul-devouring undead and heathen spirits of death.
Peering at the situation through your familiarity with modern girls and ancient warrior-women, and you can see where Olga might have decided to return someone's interest.
Following the conclusion of the cult-hunt, Olga and her Quincy beau, David, were officially betrothed. The actual wedding didn't take place for another two years, as that was how long it took for the couple to overcome the issues that Quincy culture DID have with the arrangement, ranging from that whole Echt/Gemischt business and the Wandenreich's isolationism to more mundane matters like a bride-to-be who didn't know the first thing about keeping a house or raising a family OR archery!
Given that Olga's sword ended up in Silbern, you can guess that they ultimately got past those issues, although most of the details aren't included - either the sword wasn't present to "witness" most of them, or the Spell of Literary Vision doesn't consider them worth mentioning. There are some further demon-hunts of note, a few enounters with Hollows, and a "friendly match" with a Knappe that turned very unpleasant when Olga's sword expressed an intense dislike of the man and she subsequently took his arm off at the elbow, but around the time her first child was born, Olga set her blade aside to focus on being a mother. Attempts to train three of her children to use the blade followed, but their spiritual talents were Quincy through-and-through.
The last entry speaks of Olga facing down a Shinigami officer during the Quincy Genocide some decades later, a battle fought in defense of a family of Earthbound Quincy and in defiance of Silbern's refusal to risk their secrecy and involve themselves. Olga won that particular fight-
"Does it say how?" Urahara wonders with interest.
"Yeah," you reply. "Apparently, her sword didn't like that particular Shinigami, either."
The shopkeeper considers that answer as he turns to peer at the blade.
"Don't poke it," Ambrose warns him. "Holy weapons that consider you unworthy have a nasty sting, even if you're just touching them."
-but keeping that one family safe seems to have been the extent of her involvement in the greater conflict.
After that, there's nothing.
Gained the Sword of Olga
"Does anybody know a good way to get to know a sword without getting it mad at you?" you venture.
"I am thinking on that," Urahara admits absently, still looking intently at Olga's Sword. "Standard Shinigami practices wouldn't be entirely applicable for most weapons, but this one has enough of a spiritual presence that jinzen MIGHT get a response..."
"'Sword meditation'?" you interrupt.
"It's an advanced technique meant to draw out the full power of one's zanpakuto," the shopkeeper replies. "A zanpakuto goes through four major stages in its existence: asauchi; zanpakuto; shikai; and bankai. The asauchi is the sword's original form, before it's attuned to a specific wielder or awoken its own spirit. It's essentially the 'mass-production model', perfectly functional as a sword in anyone's hands and capable of performing soul burials or cleansing Hollows, but its overall combat power is very low, it's not ideally suited for use by any specific wielder, and it displays no other abilities until it's absorbed enough of the wielder's spiritual power for its own spirit to fully form."
That last part sounds quite a bit like what your Blessed Blade has been doing, although based on what your Shadow saw and sensed during that brief Hollow hunt with Urahara, you very much doubt that your sword would have the same effect on a Hollow if you were to stab it to its second death.
"The physical form of an awakened zanpakuto is more personalized to its wielder than the asauchi," Urahara continues. "It may still not be their ideal weapon, but it tends to be a much better fit for their overall build, preferred fighting style, and ultimate potential, which makes it easier for them to use and more effective in battle - which is on top of its overall increase in combat power from the asauchi. To reach the next stage, shikai, a Shinigami needs to communicate and harmonize with their zanpakuto's spirit, something that usually happens through dreams, meditation, or the occasional waking vision. When their awareness of and respect for their zanpakuto are deemed sufficient, the spirit will tell the Shinigami its name, allowing them to call upon its power. Finally, there's the bankai, which requires the Shinigami to grow strong enough to force their zanpakuto spirit to physically manifest in the outer world, so that they can confront and subdue it."
Wait, what?
Gained Local Knowledge (Soul Society) D (Plus)
"You lot FIGHT your own swords?" Ambrose asks, quirking an eyebrow. "That seems... counterproductive, if I'm being honest."
"Maybe it's different with these particular entities," Balthazar adds, "but most spirits wouldn't be happy with being forced to surrender control of their powers to another like that."
"Most zanpakuto AREN'T happy about it," Urahara agrees, "which is part of the reason why the bankai that a Shinigami first unlocks is never the fullest extent of their zanpakuto's power. Training, combat experience, and other forms of personal growth can improve your understanding of and control over that basic bankai, but to unlock ALL of your zanpakuto's potential, you have to master jinzen. The meditation lets you consciously enter your inner world, which is where the zanpakuto spirit resides and is at its most powerful. If you can overcome it THERE, where the spirit can use its full strength and abilities against you, instead of forcing it to manifest in a much more limited state, THEN you start earning the right to learn and use everything your zanpakuto is capable of. The fundamental problem," he says then, turning back to the Sword of Olga, "is that this sword ISN'T a zanpakuto and doesn't have the same sort of connection to a wielder. Unless there's a magical equivalent...?"
"It's possible to do something SIMILAR," Ambrose allows. "Any magical item can be designed with set qualifications that a prospective wielder must meet before some or all of its supernatural properties will activate, and those requirements CAN be made fairly specific - but limiting use to just one person? That usually requires divine assistance, and even THEN, if you can find someone who is very, very close to the original intended wielder, they can usually convince the object to grant them at least a portion of its power. Based on how it gained its powers," he adds, glancing at the holy sword himself, "I don't think this weapon counts as one of those."
"It's also possible to create intelligent magic items," Balthazar says next, "which can pick and choose who gets to use their full abilities, but again, they're not usually so selective. Most such weapons that I've heard of were made for a reason, whether to defend a particular land or hunt a specific sort of enemy, and anyone who's willing to pursue their goals in a way that won't anger the weapon is generally free to wield it. Again" - and here HE looks to the weapon - "I don't think this is one of those."
Urahara nods. "Standard jinzen probably wouldn't work, then. I'd have to experiment to come up with a method that WOULD, and, well, my own zanpakuto wouldn't appreciate that." He pats his cane.
"What about mine?" you ask, taking out the Blessed Blade.
"Eh?"
"Hm?"
"What's this, now?"
"My sword has a spirit of its own." You explain how, originally, the Blessed Blade was just a weapon you could summon with the Goddess's blessing, but how after you overcame the Ring of Trials at your birthday, the Goddesses made the sword physically real and imbued it with a nascent spirit - a spirit from which you've heard nothing since and are a little anxious about as a result.
"Don't-" all three older men start to say at once, before they stop and start trading speaking glances. Urahara gestures with his concealed zanpakuto a couple of times, apparently not-speaking as the expert on sword-spirits, but Ambrose seems determined to silently argue the point, whereas Balthazar looks kind of exasperated by the two of them.
An idea occurs.
It is, perhaps, not the most helpful.
It is, however, amusing.
Thus, you go with it.
With a dramatic, disappointed sigh that doesn't fail to get the attention of the others in the room, you cast the Spell of Prestidigitation and conjure up three small sticks within the grasp of your hand.
Wordlessly, you turn to Balthazar - who was simply the nearest of the three - and extend that hand.
The Merlinean Master silently considers his choices, and then takes one of the sticks.
You hold up your other hand, index finger raised in a request for continued silence, and then turn to Urahara, who takes the next stick.
Ambrose huffs and takes the remaining stick with a sulky expression - which turns into a smug smile as he holds it up and declares, "I'm Number One!"
"Two," Balthazar admits.
"Three," Urahara sighs.
Although you are tempted to say that the high number wins, you gesture for Ambrose to speak.
"Alright, the thing I'm sure we were all about to tell you is, 'Don't poke at the divinely spawned spirit while it's still forming'," he says with a fair degree of seriousness. "It's not exactly a babe in the womb, but there are parallels, and interfering with its ongoing development risks harming or killing the spirit, either of which would be a shame and upset your patrons. For the best results, you need to exercise some patience, let the spirit wake up when it's good and ready, and in the meantime take care of the physical blade without treating it like it's made of spun glass - unless of course you want it to 'grow up' to be a pacifist or something. If you want it to be a fighter, go out and use it to fight a few times; if you want it to hate demons in general and corpse-demons in particular, go out and stab a few of them with it, and then be sure to clean it afterwards; and whatever you do, DON'T go on an extermination spree like the ones you've read about today or otherwise pour excessive amounts of energy into it. Surface effects are fine, and even that golden nonsense of yours should be tolerable in small doses, given the common origins and the time the weapon's had to get acclimated to you. Deep-reaching or long-term exposures are NOT fine."
Okay, that is-
!
-wait, would the Spell of the Dark Self count? Because you've used that to create copies of your sword when spawning Shadow Alex a number of times, now.
"Have your Goddesses or their minions said anything against it?"
They have not.
"And you need to use one of those Hearts they gave you to catalyze the spell, correct?"
You do.
"Can you cast the spell on an object, rather than on an entity?"
You cannot, at least not directly. You can copy objects that a creature is carrying, and of course, you've learned that you can get a two-for-one deal if the target has a familiar, but that's been the extent of things so far.
"In that case, I would say that you're fine. From what I've seen of your deities, I rather doubt they would have set you up to be spawning and killing infant spirits every time you used another of their gifts, and if it had happened by accident, they surely would have sent you an emergency vision or messenger by now."
...okay, that is a definite relief. Though Shadow Alex's sword...?
"Would undoubtedly JUST be a sword, however magical," Ambrose says. He then turns and gestures for Balthazar to take his turn.
"I think you covered everything I was going to say," the senior sorcerer admits.
"My turn, then?" Urahara states.
"Be my guest."
He nods and turns to you. "If you really do have a developing sword-spirit in there that's been empowered by exposure to your energies, then even without the sort of direct spiritual connection that a Shinigami and zanpakuto have, it should be possible for you to make contact with the spirit through meditation. If you want, we can run a few strictly non-invasive experiments and long-term observations as part of those lessons and check-ups you wanted."
Urahara blinks. "Are you sure? I mean, the chance to study an arcane equivalent to the asauchi/zanpakuto developmental phase would probably be worth the cost of the endeavor all on its own."
"Intellectually, sure," you reply. "But I think Tessai would be happier if we were contributing to your budget in the process - or at least breaking even."
"...right," Urahara says after a moment. "You're right."
As there's nothing more to say or do about your Blessed Blade for the time being, you move to put it away-
!
-and then pause as you remember something else sword-related.
"Oh, by the way - Ambrose, Balthazar? Do you remember that weird Demon Lord that Miss Akasha fought?"
"The archmage turned nightmare entity turned mouse, or the flamboyant one who turned into living steel?" Ambrose inquires.
"The latter."
"What about him?" Balthazar asks.
"Well, towards the end of that fight, when he was leaning on that pedestal or whatever it was, there was a moment when I thought I saw him turn into a sword."
That gets a couple of blinks.
"Say wot?"
You describe the weapon you briefly glimpsed, a sword in some ways so very similar to Hyrulean blades in general and the Master Sword in particular, but for the reddish-black hue of its metal, its zig-zagging edges, the bat-winged guard, and that aura of darkness in place of one of light.
And of course, the inverted Triforce emblem.
Ambrose hears you out, frowning all the while. As soon as you've completed your description, he says, "Right, I think we might need to take a short break to look into this. I do have that recording..."
A few minutes later, in the theater-
Urahara is looking around with an impressed expression and a certain thoughtfulness.
-Ambrose finishes setting up one of his Recording Crystals in the projector and turns it on.
An image of the Ring of Trials as seen from Ambrose's point of view appears on the screen, showing you about to enter your First Trial. As you step onto the Triforce emblem at the center of the sandy pit and disappear, the image pauses and then rapidly blurs ahead as Ambrose adjusts his arcane contraption.
A moment later-
*SHING*
*SHING*
*WHOOSH*
*SHING*
*CLA-BOOM*
-you see Link fighting several clones of Akasha, one of which self-destructs.
"Overshot," Ambrose mutters to himself, rewinding.
The next image that pops up is Akasha holding a tiny, angrily squeaking fuzzball in the palm of her hand.
"Too far the other way," the wizard says.
The third time proves to be the charm, as the next image that appears has Akasha fighting Ghirahim in his metallic form. After watching the bout for a couple of seconds, you're pretty sure that this was before the brief sword-flash, and a few second on, you're entirely sure.
Nobody says anything as Ambrose lets the recording play out, until maybe half a minute on, an explosion of youki delivered by the sword Bloodriver drives the Demon Lord into that short spike covered with divine emblems. Ghirahim punches the thing in desperation and frustration, takes a moment to speak to the sky, and then...
Nothing.
That was definitely the moment where you saw his shining metal form flicker and be momentarily replaced by that wicked black blade, but Ambrose didn't see it, and so it isn't present in his recorded memories.
As Ghirahim looks up to speak with Akasha, Ambrose pauses the playback.
"Did you see anything this time?" he asks.
"I did not," you confirm. "It should have looked like this, though."
You cast a Spell to Create a Minor Image, filling part of the space above you with a recreation of the scene you just watched, only with the vaguely Fae demonic entity of metal briefly switching places with a massive demonic sword.
"Hold that image a moment," Ambrose requests, before advancing his playback a bit. When he gets to the part where Link draws the Master Sword, the "camera" obligingly zooms in on the holy weapon, at which point the wizard pauses again and looks between the two weapons.
"Definitely a resemblance," Urahara notes, "although if the dark sword is to scale and was meant to be used with a single-handed grip, the wielder would have to have been three meters tall at least..." He turns to you. "And you think this was a sword-spirit?"
"I can't be sure that he wasn't," you admit. "Since the topic came up, I figured I should check to see if it might be important."
"I wouldn't say it was UN-important," the shopkeeper answers slowly, "but seeing as how this sword is apparently from that magic kingdom in another world...?" He pauses there.
You nod.
"Then it's probably not an IMMEDIATE concern. At least not for us."
"Hello?" Shadow Briar calls from the hallway then. "Helloooo? ...man, where did everybody go all of a sudden?"
Returning to the weapons locker-
"Oh, there you are!" Shadow Briar exclaims as you leave the theater. Hanging in mid-air in the middle of the hallway, she calls into a nearby room: "Hey, partner! I found them!"
A moment later, Shadow Alex leans out of the door. "Did somebody have a sudden urge to watch a movie?" he asks with a mild frown of puzzlement. Even as he speaks, he hands over the spare Shadow Book he went off to conjure a little while ago.
"Ambrose played back a memory for us to check on something," you answer vaguely.
...
"You're not going to tell me what it was, are you."
"I mean, the next you will know anyway..."
-you set up to pull a Literary Vision off of that curious wooden weapon.
Your earlier not-really-a-guess about the origins of the club-mace-thing are borne out. Its maker was an American named John Mason, who called himself "Greenspeaker"-
"Oh, hell," Ambrose sighs.
"You know this one?" you ask.
"Unless there were two of him, then yes. Keep reading."
-and was something of a professional troublemaker on both sides of the mystical divide. Born in 1949, Mr. Mason was just the right age to get swept up in the counterculture movement of the '60s, which was when he discovered his aptitude for Nature Magic-
"He got stoned in his backyard, wandered into the adjacent wooded lot, and spent the rest of the day talking to the plants and the animals," Ambrose supplies. "It wouldn't have been anything unusual for the time, except that when he woke up in the woods the next morning, more or less sober, the plants and the animals were still talking."
-and made the contacts that would enable him to develop his skills to a rather surprising degree for a modern-day druid, and later to become a professional supplier of "top quality, not only natural, but SUPERnatural" drugs.
You do a double-take and re-read that last section, but the words don't change.
"...why do you know a drug dealer, Ambrose?"
"He went on a self-described 'pilgrimage in search of enlightenment, groovy chicks, and better weed' in... '66, I think he said it was?" The wizard considers, then shrugs. "Did the traditional druid thing of traveling as an animal or with the help of animals, did the decidedly UNtraditional thing of hitchhiking - both as man and as various tiny, harmless, adorable beasts - did the frankly stupid thing of walking into a portal to Faerie in '68 even AFTER being told what it was and how dangerous it was to go alone-"
Okay, yeah, that was kind of dumb. Even YOU have never really gone to Faerie alone, and you've had a Great Fairy looking out for you - if only as her daughter's partner - every time.
"-and then did the admittedly impressive thing of surviving the place for the better part of two years before finding his way back to Earth," Ambrose goes on. "The portal he used to get back dropped him near Cardiff and made a lot of noise, mystically speaking, which caught my attention. I tracked him down after a couple of days, beat him over the head a few times until he stopped trying to bite me, and convinced him he was genuinely back on Earth, in Wales, and it was 1971."
...hang on a second. Two years of travel starting in '66, most of two years in Faerie starting in '68, and he came back in '71?
"Only lost a year, huh?" Balthazar muses. "Not bad for a long-term stay in Faerie, especially if it was his first time off-world."
"I told him as much, but he was still pretty pissed off about landing on the wrong side of the pond," Ambrose says with a shrug. "Though that was nothing compared to his reaction when he found out about Woodstock..." The wizard shakes his head. "Anyway, whatever Johnny-boy was like before his trek through the everlasting twilight, the man who came out of it was a suspicious, angry, and not terribly keen on being told what to do. He'd also managed to bootstrap himself up to casting sixth-tier spells, when he seemed to have started with only third."
A dangerous combination, you admit, as you turn back to the Book. The Literary Vision corroborates Ambrose's account, covering some of the highlights of John Mason's time in Faerie. Evidently, he initially adopted the "Greenspeaker" name to protect himself after one Fae bargain - fortunately with a minor denizen - got him into some trouble. He also picked up a number of plant specimens that he would later bring back to Earth and use in his eventual business-
"I always figured as much, but was never able to confirm," Ambrose notes. "Good to know."
-which is what really started to get him into trouble with the powers that be, mystical or otherwise.
Before his extended stay in Faerie, John Mason had been a fairly mellow, trusting soul whose only real agenda was to explore his magic, have a good time, and look out for his friends - of all species. The man who returned from Faerie was a harsher, more driven, and healthily paranoid sort, with far keener awareness of and less tolerance for threats to himself and his people, and a much greater willingness and ability to resort to violence in defense of what he considered his. On top of that, two years of living wild in and channeling the natural energies of another world had accustomed Greenspeaker to isolation from his own kind, acting on instinct and intuition for the sake of survival and freedom from the endless pranks and plots of the Fae.
Needless to say, this mindset was one that did not translate well to life in 1970s Boston.
Initially, the displaced druid tried to set himself up in a refuge in one of the parks near his old neighborhood, where he could have the privacy he desired and still be close enough to reconnect with his family and friends, but his extended absence, altered behavior, and supernatural abilities that he used almost as readily as he breathed alienated him from many of those he'd previously considered close. At the same time, modern civilization's constant intrusions on Greenspeaker's "territory" - the light, the noise, the pollution, the PEOPLE - wore on him in other ways.
Greenspeaker combatted these stressors by making use of his "herbs," which - by habit learned the hard way after dealing with Fae hospitality - he politely shared with his invited guests and those who welcomed him into their own homes. Some of these plants, even the varieties originating from Faerie, were unremarkable, but others had astonishing and literally magical effects, and in short order, there was demand for them.
As there were SOME products of the Twentieth Century that druidic magic either couldn't provide replacements for or that Greenspeaker didn't want to spend most of his time laboring to produce, and since finding regular employment to earn money to pay for such things had proven a non-starter, he began growing his herbs in bulk and processing and selling them to others in his circle of acquaintances. Had things stayed there, the druid's activities might have flown under the radar or at least been grudgingly tolerated, but some of those who purchased his products did not do so for personal use - or at least not solely - instead re-selling the herbs to other interested buyers. A few of those individuals, in turn, would sell to others, and soon enough, Greenspeaker's wares were circulating across the city.
The police and City Hall weren't thrilled to have these exotic new drugs in their town, particularly given the inexplicable and occasionally alarming effects that some of the otherworldly and magically potent plants could have on people.
Boston's supernatural community was similarly displeased, and not just because some idiot was carelessly allowing dozens or hundreds of mundane humans to get their hands on literally magical weed. Greenspeaker's drugs had circulated among the mystically aware set as well, and as different kinds of magic don't always mix in predictable fashion, there had been some incidents.
The druid himself was fairly ignorant of the trouble he was attracting, until one of the local magic-users managed to track him back to his lair and attempted to lay down the law.
Having a complete stranger with magical powers barge into his home uninvited and try to order him around with threats of legal, physical, and arcane retribution stomped all over Greenspeaker's Fae-induced trauma, basically ensuring that the meeting ended badly - specifically, with the intruder turned into a yappy dog via Baleful Polymorph.
"Was he stuck like that?" Briar wonders, leaning forward on your shoulder to get a better look at the words in the Book.
Said words confirm that it took a few days for the 'dog' to convince anybody that he'd been transformed, a couple more weeks for them to find somebody that could break the spell, and then most of another month to put together the money to pay for it. By then, Greenspeaker had been through several more meetings with "representatives" of Boston's Moonlit community - some more official than others - resulting in a couple more forced-transformations, one building getting devoured by sudden overgrowth, another getting burned down, and a sudden spike in animal attacks.
The mystical side hadn't been expecting or prepared for a druid with Greenspeaker's level of power, let alone the casual manner in which he flung spells around in plain sight of mundane witnesses, and the need to hide or destroy the evidence and suppress the reports of what was going on in and around the city put them even further on the back foot. Factor in the displeasure of the in-the-know mundane authorities for their counterparts' inability to keep "one of their people" from causing havoc to begin with, and it took quite a while for the officials to get their act together.
In the end, though, Greenspeaker was just one man, with no allies that could stand alongside him under their own power, and as capable as he was in a fight, he wasn't really all that clever - something his habitual use of mind-altering substances hadn't helped. He had no plan, no defined goals or strategy to realistically achieve them, he was just lashing out at people and things that upset him without considering the consequences or whether or not there might be a better way to get what he wanted. On top of that, he was too used to dealing with supernatural problems via supernatural solutions and hadn't really considered just how dangerous guns could be, or how quickly heavy equipment and explosives could clear out overgrown trees and earthworks.
It seems that it was the sight of his forest dwelling being torn down by backhoe and bulldozer which gave the druid the initial idea for his odd weapon. The wooden body has been mystically imbued with a hardness more akin to metal and is further enchanted with spells that greatly enhance its destructive power against buildings, machinery, and tools. It's evidently comparable to a handheld siege engine for the sheer amount of damage each hit can wreak on the works of humanity, and it can strike quite a bit faster than such cumbersome weapons, but when used against humans themselves - or any other creature, living or undead - the so-called "Shatterstick" is decidedly unimpressive, unless the goal is to destroy whatever equipment they're carrying.
In the winter of 1974, Greenspeaker was forced out of his native city, to once again wander the country in search of a new place to call home and do business. It was a search that would last for the next decade and see little success, for once it was clear that he'd fled Boston, the local authorities had alerted their peers in other cities and major towns to be on the lookout for Greenspeaker and his products; their superiors on the state and national level were also watching for the man, and stories of him and his products had spread among the darker elements besides, some of whom wanted access to the druid's herbs and wouldn't take no for an answer, while others refused to tolerate a rival dealer or powerful magic-user on their turf.
Everywhere he went, Greenspeaker found more trouble, sometimes as soon as he entered a new town, and it made him angrier and more bitter. He began making regular use of the Shatterstick almost as soon as he'd completed it, very literally breaking into the workplaces, homes, and occasional vaults of those who crossed him and making a special point of wrecking any vehicles they owned. He also began targeting construction and maintenance sites making use of heavy equipment, initially just out of spite and petty vengeance for the loss of his original lair, but later as part of a semi-serious campaign against development projects that threatened the natural environment.
"Only semi-serious?" Urahara wonders.
"If he'd been completely serious, he would have been summoning mobs of elementals and walking trees to flatten such places," Ambrose replies. "Then he'd have repaired all the damage to the land in the aftermath, populated them with the most human-unfriendly plants, insects, and animals he could find, and probably laid a few curses on the terrain to really mess up the next group of people who tried disturbing the place."
Yeah, even by your standards, a sixth- or seventh-tier druid can do some serious damage if he really wants to... though that bit about cursing terrain is new and a bit startling to hear.
"What was that part about cursing the land?" you ask with a certain professional curiosity and personal wariness.
"Not something you typically associate with druids?" Ambrose guesses.
"Not really, no."
The wizard nods. "To be fair, curses in general aren't one of their specialties, not like priests calling down the wrath of a god or a witch giving someone grief for looking at her funny. It's also not something most of them will do lightly, but they CAN do it. As a rule, a druidic curse involves making some aspect of the natural world more difficult or dangerous for the victim to interact with, like animals always shunning or attacking them, sunlight blinding or burning them, or water being impossible to drink or actively trying to drown them. A druid as capable as Greenspeaker was can choose for the 'aspect of nature' in question to be an entire physical AREA, causing all sorts of unpleasant phenomenon to manifest within its reaches, such as intensely bad weather, infestations of parasites, actively hostile plants and animals, and more."
Just one more reason not to cross a druid without a really compelling reason, you suppose.
"True enough," Ambrose agrees. "If you ever happen upon an area like that, be prepared for it to be a complete pain in the posterior to deal with. Regional curses aren't impossible to break, but it does require you to direct your efforts at some anchor-point, which is typically located right at the center of the afflicted area."
"Meaning you'd have to go through everything the curse could throw at you before you could even make the attempt to break it," you surmise.
"For bonus points, some of those places can be miles across. Fun prospect, isn't it?"
Delightful.
Shaking your head, you get back to the last section of the druid's tale.
Living on the move is not the easiest lifestyle to begin with, and it becomes all the more trying when it's not the sort of life that you want for yourself or you're being hunted - let alone both. Because of this, Greenspeaker's limited patience and short temper only worsened over time, as did his dependence on his herbs and the resulting side-effects of their use - among them, a gradual loss of the mental focus required to safely wield natural energy. As the druid lost that fine control and continued to move from location to location, not giving himself proper time to acclimate to a region's unique energies, his magic's impact upon his thought processes and behavior patterns grew more and more severe.
Three years out of Boston, and "John Mason" was a name whose owner no longer recalled ever using it.
Three years after that, and even the name Greenspeaker was hardly ever used, its owner communicating more often through glares, grunts, and gestures when he wasn't resorting to displays of violence. Frequent long-term use and then overuse of shapeshifting had left permanent marks on his human form - or perhaps he simply didn't care to turn all the way back to normal, preferring the claws, fangs, senses and hide of a predator over the blunt nails and teeth, dull senses, and soft skin of a human.
Three years later still, and what had once been a man now appeared to be a beast entirely - form differing from day to day and even moment to moment - save that he retained his magic and was continuing to grow more proficient in its use, and thus all the more dangerous. By this point, Greenspeaker had wholly abandoned most trappings of humanity, becoming one more terrible monster among the many roaming the shadows, though some things such as the Shatterstick he kept with him for their usefulness, or out of a lingering sense of possession.
It was in 1984 that the creature which had once been a human druid crossed paths with the Wandenreich. Personnel based at an outpost in Denver, Colorado detected a powerful spirit having entered the city limits, bringing with it an unnatural storm and reports of violence of a decidedly uncanny sort. While hunting for the source of the trouble, their teams came upon a riot in the night, a free-for-all deathmatch between several dozen participants, human, monster, and demon alike. The sheer savagery on display was such that unarmed humans were somehow ripping demons apart with their teeth and fingernails, even as the fiends butchered them right back.
There were not many survivors of the madness by the time the Quincy arrived, and there were fewer by the time they were finish. The creature that had once been John Mason, Greenspeaker, was not among the survivors; having been identified as the "spirit" that was the source of the storm and the supernatural madness, the Soldats and local Quincy put him down as fast as possible. The Shatterstick was picked up in the aftermath, just about the only one of the druid's remaining possessions to come through the battle intact.
...
Gained Shatterstick
You wonder what the druid would have said, if he'd seen what would become of him.
"The man that I met had spent too much time dealing with Fae deception to have trusted anyone else's claims about his future," Ambrose replies, shaking his head. "Even if he'd managed to invoke a vision of the outcome on his own - which isn't likely; druidic Divination tends to focus on seeing the Now as it truly is, not looking into the distant Future - I fear he'd have been tempted to chalk it up to some bad weed and ignore it."
That may honestly be even more depressing.
Sighing, you ask, "Are cases like this common among spellcasters, or was Greenspeaker just one very unfortunate outlier?"
"Every approach to wielding supernatural power has some kind of transformative influence on the practitioner," Balthazar says frankly. "The consequences can be mental, physical, or spiritual; they can be good, bad, or just weird; they can happen slowly or swiftly or be held off for a lifetime if you're good or lucky; and they can be temporary, chronic, or terminal; but they're always there. Most traditions arrange themselves to maximize the benefits of their particular approach to power and avoid or mitigate the detriments, but even the best safeguards and warnings are useless if an individual decides to ignore them and overuses, abuses, or mishandles their power."
Your and Dave's recurring comparison of magic to the Force comes to mind, accompanied by a slow, ominous rendition of the Imperial March.
"Greenspeaker's case WAS exceptional," the Merlinean Master continues, "but more for the number of factors that contributed to his downfall than for the fact that it happened. For starters, he WAS a druid, and natural energy is not and never will be a 'tame' source of power. Almost the opposite, really. John Mason also seems to have been largely self-taught, which wouldn't have done him any favors for knowing how to use his magic safely, and the habitual drug use would have just made that worse."
"Let he who has never used a mind-altering substance cast the first bong," Ambrose snarks.
"Plenty of traditions do use mind-altering substances for various spells, rituals, and ceremonies, but there's a difference between doing that and just getting high," Balthazar says levelly. "Even at his best, Mason seems to have been leaning more towards the latter approach. Beyond that, his time in Faerie not only messed him up via isolation, endangerment, and at least one Fae bargain gone bad, it also exposed him to new narcotics of a mystical nature, some of which he brought back to Earth to cultivate and use. You've been trying to grow plants from another world, right?"
You nod.
"How's that been working out?"
"Not ideally," you admit. "And I've got a druid on mystical speed-dial. So, you think Greenspeaker might have been accidentally poisoning himself?"
"Probably not by that point," Balthazar admits. "Most druids develop immunity to poison around the time they unlock fifth-tier spellcasting. That said, Greenspeaker might have damaged himself when he first started using drugs derived from Fae plants, and once he started growing descendants of those plants on Earth, he may not have been getting what he expected out of them - not just physically, but mystically."
Right, the Book mentioned that some of Greenspeaker's magical clients suffered bad reactions between the drugs and their magic. If something similar but more subtle was happening to him, would he have noticed? And given his isolated and subsequently semi-nomadic lifestyle, would anyone else have been close enough to him to see it and try to help him? Or get him help?
...actually, what sort of help WAS there for Greenspeaker to get? Would a mundane psychotherapist have been able to help him come to terms with his problems, or would it have taken the efforts of some kind of magical mind-healer? For that matter, do people like that even exist on Earth?
"Traditionally, people who wanted professional advice on dealing with mental health issues went to their healers or spiritual advisors," Balthazar says. "Sometimes not always of their own will; in certain places and times, a person demonstrating unusual behavior could be tied up and dragged to the nearest priest..."
"Being fair," Ambrose notes, "we live in a world where possession IS a genuine concern, even if it's less common today than it once was."
The Powers' injunction again?
"The general decline in magical activity on Earth has made it harder for certain classes and categories of entities to enter, survive, and/or thrive in our world," the wizard confirms with a nod. "Fewer summoners making mistakes means less opportunity for extraplanar hitchhikers to cross over, for instance, and while the increased population does provide more potential hosts in general, it also makes it harder to stay unnoticed - not to mention that any possessing entity that has SPECIFIC preferences in its victims has to winnow through the crowds to FIND that ideal target. On the downside, there are fewer holy men and spirit guides able to deal with the body-snatchers that do get through, or even just recognize the difference between possession and a mental disorder, which has caused all sorts of issues and suffering over the last millennium."
"Modern psychotherapy is kind of hobbled when it comes to the sort of disorders that arise from overexposure to magical energy," Balthazar says then. "It can treat the symptoms, but the underlying causes are metaphysical in nature and beyond a therapist's ability to affect. Getting help sorting out his memories and feelings of that trek through Faerie might have done Greenspeaker some good, but he would have had to find a therapist who was in the know and wouldn't just dismiss talk about fairies as a delusion or something that needed medication. And it would have helped if they were the sort that wouldn't freak out the first time he assumed or reverted from an animal form in their office," the sorcerer adds with a shrug.
And now you're reminded of Larry's reaction to Monkey Alex.
"Not a lot of magical mind-healers out there, then?" you guess.
"Not really. Some enchanters could probably do the job fairly well, but we've talked about the issues with them before."
Yeah, that time you were trying to find a quick and easy means of memory-modification to deal with the more problematic of the Ishida relatives. A lot of specialists in Enchantment Magic just aren't trustworthy, at least not to the extent required for things like this.
Still... you DO have more than your share of unpleasant memories and nightmares deriving from them. Maybe...
Absently, you pick up another piece of loot.
Gained Desert Blade
There are only a few weapons left for your consideration at this point.
The first of these is another staff. Instead of a metal head with rings hanging off of it, this one is mainly just a fancier version of the fighting sticks you've seen (but not much used) at Lu-sensei's. It's right around six feet tall - and looks a bit taller than that given the stand holding it up - but promises to be somewhat lighter than other weapons of its style, as it has a series of small holes drilled through it. You aren't sure why anyone would do that-
"It whistles when someone swings it around," Ambrose says with a shrug.
-okay, then.
The thing that really gets your attention is that while there is energy imbued into the staff, it's neither divine nor arcane in nature. Instead, it feels a great deal like ki, except... faded, compared to what you sense from living beings. There's also a faint elemental tinge to it, whispering of the wind.
What a curious thing.
Next up is another Western-style sword of a markedly different design than Olga's Blade. This one is a great two-handed thing that you're fairly sure is a claymore, and which would be almost as tall as you are if stood upright with its tip on the floor. The intimidating size of the weapon is seriously undermined by its condition, however, which is decidedly the worse for wear: the edges are chipped in several places; the blade is actually bent slightly about halfway down its length, as if it was used to smash at something much too solid for it; and the aura of the magic bound to the weapon has been weakened by that damage, though not to the point where it's faded. What you can read of the energies in this state suggests unchecked anger and wild aggression.
You aren't sure what to do with this one. The damage to the edges and any potential stress fractures that you can't see or recognize would be fixable with the Spell to Make Whole, but even the greater version of that magic wouldn't repair a warping of the blade such as you're looking at, and you're not sure how that will affect an attempt to restore the sword's magical functions to full strength. You THINK it would still work, but then you'd have a bent magic sword, which is not really ideal.
Then there's the emotional elements of that aura to consider...
Finally - and here you pause to take a deep, calming breath - there is a trident.
It is, thankfully, very much NOT a weapon wreathed in Darkness and Evil, nor is it a heavy-bladed, sharp-angled thing whose central point is nearly as large as the other two prongs put together. Instead, the arms curve outward from the haft and support short, spear-like tips that reach to the base of the only slightly thicker central point. The whole thing is made of some faintly bluish metal, with a bit of decorative gold about the base of three-pointed head and keen white edges on the three pointed tips.
Two familiar elemental auras emanate from the trident, one crackling in a more restrained manner than Brontes' Thunderbolt, the other... honestly on par with the intensity of Cold Iron's chill. There is also a faint sense of water about the weapon, although not in a manner that suggests it enjoys any particular power over the element, just a great deal of exposure to it.
You're a little disappointed that there isn't a third element properly bound to the weapon, just to complete the set. Then again, if this thing was used in or under the water as much as its aura suggests, the lack of a fire-based power would make sense.
You aren't anything special with a stick in hand, and the strength of the energies bound to this staff doesn't suggest that it's anything to write home about on its own. That said, a chance to study a weapon imbued with ki instead of some form of magic is one you're not about to pass up.
As you take the staff down from its stand, Ambrose's remark about it whistling when spun around comes back to you, and you give it a single slow twirl-
*whoo*
-which you stop abruptly.
"Did I just feel what I think I just felt?" Briar asks.
"If you think you felt the ki signature shift," you tell her, while holding up the staff and peering at its aura more closely, "then, yes."
"What's this?" Ambrose asks.
"I think the staff is reacting to being wielded by a ki-user," you answer, looking up at the wizard. "Not to ME in particular, just someone capable of manipulating and projecting their ki. Did whoever handled it before not have that training?"
"I'd have to check who was responsible for that one to be sure, but it's pretty likely," Ambrose agrees.
Into the circle of incense-bearing figurines goes the Bent Blade, spoken are the words, and filled are more of the pages of your Shadow Book.
This heavy blade dates back to the early 1500s, and its most significant use at that time was at the Battle of Flodden, in 1513, which was evidently the largest battle ever fought between the Kingdoms of England and Scotland. There is also a note that, shortly before the battle, the blade was used against a demon called Plotcock-
"Wait, that one was real?" Ambrose exclaims.
-that had been attempting to place a curse upon the battle, ostensibly to ensure the Scots suffered a ruinous defeat and as many deaths as possible. Although the wretch was driven off before he could complete his wicked work, the Scottish forces still lost the battle, with a casualty count well in excess of their English opponents' - perhaps as high as a third of their entire force, including King James IV.
While the owner of the sword survived Flodden, he went rather mad in the aftermath, blaming the terrible losses as much on himself and his companions for their failure to slay the demon as on Plotcock and the English - who clearly must have been in league. Desperate for vengeance, the swordsman attempted to rally his fellows to hunt the devil and its godless co-conspirators, but he found no support for the idea: several of their cohort had been killed fighting the fiend the first time; more had fallen in the battle; and those that remained had no heart to seek further confrontation with the English, lest they return in force and wreak an even greater slaughter. Indeed, the fear of that outcome was such that the swordsman's clan forbade him from seeking revenge, saying that none who bore their name and colors would so endanger the rest.
And so, the Scotsman abandoned kith and kin and even his very name, leaving to hunt Plotcock alone.
The strength and skill of a lone human do not often amount to much in the war on the supernatural, but fury and madness have a power all their own, and the Scotsman had both to spare. Following a trail of rumors, hunches, and information menaced or beaten out of this or that denizen of the night, he found that Plotcock had not been alone in his curse-calling, nor had the aim been to curse the Scots alone - the battle ITSELF had been intended to be cursed, that Scotsman and Englishman alike would die by the tens of thousands, and their corpses spawn and spread a new plague to afflict both kingdoms and the rest of the Isles besides, if not the mainland.
Just as he and his brothers in arms had thwarted Plotcock, the demons entrusted with the "English side" of the dark work had been foiled by agents of the Watchers' Council - and just like the Scotsman's failure to kill his quarry, not all of the other curse-callers had been slain. Some had been forced from their sanctuaries and were, even now, fleeing ahead of close pursuit; others had slain their would-be killers and then disappeared anyway; and some remained in their lairs, fortifying and gathering their strength for the inevitable follow-up assaults.
Into these engagements stormed the Scotsman, howling for Plotcock's head. Though he offered no aid to the hated English that he encountered and left more than one a groaning heap on the ground, battered by fist and blade-hilt, his killing fury was reserved for the demons, their human associates, and the odd enslaved beast. One by one, the remaining holdouts were destroyed or driven to flight like their peers, the lot of them pushed further south until they had to flee Britain entirely.
As Plotcock survived this expulsion, the Scotsman pursued him to the continent, and then through many of its nations. Even in lands where his rough English and Lowland Scots were useless and his Gaelic unheard of, the hunter would somehow unfailingly find his prey, as though his blade thirsted for blood and vengeance as much as its master and remembered the taste of the foe that had escaped it.
Three years, the Scotsman stayed on the demon's trail, and when Plotcock fled through a portal, the swordsman did not hesitate to plunge in after him. Such should have been a suicidal act, but the Scotsman's fury had become almost a holy thing in its purity and purpose, and the demons of that realm sensed it, honored it, and fell back before him. Finding no shelter there, Plotcock fled to another plane - and again, the Scotsman stayed on his trail.
Exactly how long this pursuit lasted depends on how you count. By Earthly reckoning, three years would pass between the pair's departure through one portal and their return through another; yet to Plotcock and the Scotsman, over twice that long was spent crossing the cosmos, through easily three times as many realms.
Their return to Earth was a noisy one and involved crossing the Spirit Plane, so perhaps it is not a great surprise that the Wandenreich detected the event and was able to get a team to the site. For all their speed, the Quincy arrived late, seeing only the final moments of the final battle, in which the Scotsman at last took Plotcock's head, let out a roar of triumph - and then, his fury finally spent, he collapsed, the stresses of a decade of travel, fighting, and exposure to horrors, wonders, and weirdness such as he'd barely imagined possible finally overtaking him. The Quincy evacuated the man to Silbern and were able to get a partial account of his insane adventure out of him, but he died a few days later.
Incidentally, the bend in the Scotsman's blade occurred in that last battle. On the brink of defeat, Plotcock made a desperate attempt to suppress the power of the weapon - which, like certain others you've studied this day, had grown much from its relentless killing of supernatural foes - and actually succeeded in the endeavor. The effects WOULD have only been temporary, except that the Scotsman's next blow hit a nearby chunk of stone, bending the weakened sword and disrupting the pathways of the energy within it.
You're curious about the properties of this magical whistling stick, but you're not about to try tapping into its power in a room full of magic weapons - that's just asking for something to blow up. This leaves you a bit torn between heading down to Ambrose's spellcasting chamber and doing some tests right now or waiting for a while.
Since you can't quite make up your mind, you ask the three older men in the room what they'd prefer to do.
"It IS getting on toward lunch," Ambrose considers. "With that in mind, I would suggest that you finish up your picks from this room, then we call a break, check out the staff, and go for a meal. Unless there are any objections?"
"I could eat," Balthazar admits. "It's still around breakfasttime back in New York."
"More like a late dinner for me," Urahara replies, "but it sounds like a plan."
Wonder of wonders, you actually aren't that hungry for once. It's only been a couple of hours since you had your first meal of the day, and you haven't been active enough since then to work up much of an appetite. Still, with all the reading out loud that you've been doing, you could definitely use something to wet your throat. And maybe a little something to nibble on.
You said you weren't THAT hungry, not that you weren't hungry AT ALL.
Setting the staff aside for the moment, you proceed to learn the history of the nameless Scotsman, which quite firmly decides you on whether or not to keep his blade.
Gained the Scotsman's Sword
"Do you think his clan would like it back?" you ask, mostly directing the question at Ambrose. "Along with a copy of the account of its history?"
"I can't speak for the clan's feelings," Ambrose says, "but given the man chose to cut all ties with them for the sake of pursuing his vengeance, and apparently didn't tell the Wandenreich where he came from...?"
No, there was no mention of that in the Book.
"Then I would say that's fairly telling of HIS opinion on the matter."
That is a point.
It is with a certain nervousness that you reach out to take the bi-elemental trident in hand and remove it from its stand - and then pause, considering that, even if it isn't demonic in nature, handling a type of weapon so strongly associated with the King of Evil still might not be in your best interests.
Seeing no downside to heeding your paranoia, you do so, moving the Goddess figurines into place around its current position and then casting the Spell of Literary Vision anew.
After sensing that aura of Water impressed upon the trident, you aren't surprised to learn that the three-pronged spear isn't native to Earth. It was fashioned on the Elemental Plane of Water by a native mage-smith, who... shaped ice into the desired form, and then transmuted it to metallic crystal? Seriously?
"The entire Plane of Water is UNDER water," Ambrose says frankly. "Traditional forging practices are nearly impossible, and most of the products not really profitable - rust and tarnish, you see."
You suppose you do.
Anyway, the trident was made for a champion of one of that plane's many colonies of aquatic peoples, who had been tasked with guarding a portal that links the Endless Ocean and the Mediterranean, and the powers imbued into the weapon reflect the environments it was intended to be used in. The essence of cold was somewhat less useful on the Plane of Water, given so many sea-dwelling creatures are insulated against or simply immune to the cold, but served well to drive off nosy Earthlings. The electrical strike, meanwhile, was effective against almost any foe from either realm, barring some kind of giant electric eel or a similar creature.
The guard in question held that post for a full decade, serving well, before getting into a fight with a kraken, which he didn't swim away from. The trident was lost to the currents of the Plane of Water for an unknown span of time, eventually making its way into the claws of a sea devil - which is not a devil at all, but rather a member of an aggressive piscine humanoid species properly known as a sahuagin. The one who found the trident was a low-ranking warrior, and he used the power of his new weapon to rise higher in the ranks of his kind, defeating many an external foe and internal rival. This sahuagin's ambition ultimately outpaced his good sense, however: he picked too many fights too quickly, exhausting his personal strength and his support among his people; and in short order, he was betrayed and killed, with the trident falling into new claws.
That sahuagin took a slower, more certain approach to building his power-base, and he might have eventually ascended to kingship over a portion of his kind, if not for an ill-timed encounter with a hungry sea serpent. While not swallowed, the trident was lost to the currents once more.
The next native of the Plane of Water to claim the trident was a young mergirl, who began to dream of adventure after finding the magical weapon. Fortunately, she had the good sense to learn how to properly use the trident before setting out to follow her dreams. Most of her subsequent experiences are glossed over by your spell with a simple "four years later," at which time the now-seasoned aquatic adventuress signed up with a crew of pirate-hunters.
You pause for a moment, trying to picture that: an underwater world of magic and monsters; the sort of pirates that would exist therein, to prey upon a wholly submerged society; and the kinds of heroes that would gather to hunt them to the ends of the ocean...
In your mind's eye, you envision cities fashioned from enormous coral reefs, salvaged wrecks from ocean-going cultures across a thousand worlds, the carved bones of enormous aquatic animals, and floating icebergs. You see Zora and merfolk and octopus-people swimming about casually, while air-breathers ranging from mammalian to reptilian maneuver with comparative clumsiness and the benefit of magic or machinery that allows them to breathe. You see "schools" of such travelers and various living beasts of burden - as well as the occasional mostly intact ship, physically and magically modified to run beneath the waves - using strange compasses and Divination Magic to track ports of call that are themselves adrift on the currents, and a combination of muscle-power and Water Magic to propel themselves to their destinations.
And you picture monsters emerging from the all-encompassing deep to prey upon those wayfarers, from swarms of hungry sharks and shark-faced raiders to enormous tentacled abominations to more intact wrecks, crewed by those who may well have stolen them from their original owners. You see those very pirates swimming from their ship to pillage and plunder and do battle with desperate guards and vengeful heroes alike - and if your image of a pirate crew happens to include a lot of Gerudo, aren't pirates just aquatic bandits, in the end?
Still, even with that slightly uncomfortable parallel to your past life, it sounds like a pretty awesome scene!
The mermaid adventurer's pirate hunt was both a success and the first in a series of such jobs aboard the pirate chaser Bluesting, which spanned another four-year phase of her career and took her up against a diverse array of opponents, gradually making her name well-known across a swathe of the Boundless Sea. Such fame earned her more than one treacherous rival, ambitious foes by the score, and a number of would-be paramours, but it was not any of these that put an end to her time as a pirate-hunter. Instead, the Bluesting was caught in a vortex created by the unexpected opening of a planar gate, which split the ship in half and sucked part of it into another plane.
It's not clear what happened to the merwoman in that incident, only that she was separated from her weapon, which was on the portion of the shattered ship left behind in the Plane of Water. When the remaining survivors steered half of the Bluesting's ruined hulk into port some weeks later, the greedy noble who ruled that city impounded the wreckage and declared the missing crew members dead, that he might seize their remaining possessions as salvage.
That one owned the trident for all of a week before his manor was stormed by an angry mob. Evidently the Bluesting's remaining crew greatly disapproved of his behavior, and rallied assorted family, friends, allies, and even a few of their avowed enemies to join them in expressing their unhappiness.
When the silt settled and the bubbles cleared, items belonging to each of the missing sailors were placed aboard a fast ship whose captain had volunteered to sail for a greater settlement, where a magic-user powerful enough to determine the fates of the lost and provide means of rescuing any survivors might be found.
Unfortunately, that ship was attacked by pirates, whose captain recognized the trident, claimed it without hesitation, and wielded it for two years before being taken down. The trident was stolen by one of his crew who fled the battle where his captain died, but the weapon's history becomes vague after that, suggesting that the thief either did not use it or just did not accomplish much with it.
The next significant event in the trident's past is when it was claimed by a creature your spell names as a cecaelia - sort of like a merman with octopus tentacles instead of a fish-tail. Usually not an overly aggressive species, this particular octopus-man was a cultist of some unspeakable aquatic demon-
"Dangerous to name, actually nameless, or just unpronounceable?" Ambrose interrupts.
You turn the Book around for his consideration and point to the word.
He reads it and shakes his head. "I can feel my tongue aching just looking at that."
"Not your brain?" Balthazar asks.
"No, it doesn't seem to be one of THOSE. Silver linings, I suppose."
-and was instructed to prepare the way for his master to manifest upon the Earth. That effort was thwarted by ANOTHER group of cultists dedicated to a completely different abomination of the depths, who weren't going to put up with some piece of flotsam muscling in on their surf.
The struggle between the two groups played out along large stretches of the Mediterranean over several years and eventually drew the Wandenreich's attention, but by the time they dispatched a team to investigate, the fighting was already coming to a head. The native cult launched a surprise attack on the invaders' central temple, and the cecaelia high priest was mortally wounded in the battle - and also poisoned and cursed, his enemies evidently wanting to be VERY sure that he died. When the Quincy arrived, they found dead humans, dead fish people of varying descriptions - including actual fish, amphibians, cephalopods, crustaceans, and other things not so easily categorized - various dead aquatic creatures both natural and supernatural, and a ruined summoning ceremony with a dying octopus-man babbling and bubbling about his master's coming glory.
The Quincy put the cultist out of his misery and took his trident, which was about the only thing of note he still had at that point. This was a good thirty years ago.
the Aquatic Trident.
In light of your extended spiritual history, you have no desire to touch this or any other trident, much less wield one in combat. You also don't know of anyone that actually wields a weapon like this, although you wouldn't be terribly surprised if a few of your acquaintances knew the basics. Altria, her father, and their fellow knights and squires can probably handle spears, polearms, and related weapons decently well; Lu-sensei could probably manage; and if anybody in your social circle is likely to be genuinely skilled with the things, it would have to be one of the Water Tribesmen.
All of that being said, the creation process that gave form to this weapon is something worth looking into, just to see what you can learn about another school's approach to Transformation Magic. This one is, if not precisely alien to your current knowledge base, then definitely foreign to it - even the Zora get out of the water in order to work with metal, at least to the best of your knowledge. Plus, there's always the option of selling, trading, or gifting the trident to someone who'll give it a better home later.
As a precaution against stirring up any unwanted instincts or memories of trident-handling, you cast a modified Spell of Telekinesis to pick up the weapon and stow it in your pocket, blunt end going in first.
Gained Aquatic Trident
Before you put it away, however-
-you turn to the room at large. "Anyone want to make any bets on whether or not the mermaid who used this is still alive?"
"I've long since learned not to bet on anything that involves deep sea life," Balthazar replies wearily. "Especially not of the supernatural variety."
...that's right, the Merlinean Master has run into enough tentacled creatures to be able to notice trends among them and the beings that habitually employ, serve, or otherwise deal with them.
Ambrose, meanwhile, is muttering to himself. "Lost the weapon thirty years ago, following an eight-year career... might be possible," he finally admits. "Young merfolk mature at about the same rate as humans, but they age a bit slower on average once they're into adulthood. Presuming that she survived being yanked through an uncontrolled portal to an unknown world and then adapt from there, our fishy heroine could easily still be alive. There's a few too many uncertainties in that particular equation for me to want to make any wagers on it, though."
Urahara shrugs. "I don't know enough about merfolk to say anything in the matter."
Fair.
There are only a few weapons left for you to look at now, and as you're about to turn to the next one, Shadow Alex returns with that precautionary supply of Shadow Incense you asked for. As he hands it over, you consider your remaining mana, which is now at about a third of your maximum. That's not critically low, but given there are still two whole rooms of magical stuff to go through and potential Literary Visions to invoke, perhaps you should stop doing so and let him handle the work from here? If nothing else, it would let you recover a bit, not only magically but vocally.
You HAVE been reading aloud for quite a while now...
Honestly, you could use the break, even if it's mainly for your throat, and so you pass the Book and Incense you've been using back to their conjuror and put him to work once again.
With how few pieces there are left to look at before you take a break, Shadow Alex's grumbling is minimal - that, and you think he's just pleased to have a chance to hear these stories in person.
The first item you point him to is a dagger that was part of one of the knightly panoplies on display in the Grandmaster's collection. You nearly overlooked the blade at the time, due to where it was located relative to your position and some fairly potent anti-Divination effects that gave your passive magical senses trouble, and you hadn't thought to look for it sooner today. That might be because there were so many bigger weapons or because securing all of La Renarde's gear distracted you... and then again, it might not.
You ask Ambrose and Balthazar if they or any of the Drakes' staff experienced similar issues observing the thing and recalling its presence.
"It is pretty well-warded against casual notice, magical or mundane," Balthazar agrees.
"Combined with that bloodthirsty enhancement, and it paints a somewhat concerning picture," Ambrose adds. "Daggers of this sort were traditionally a knight's back-up weapon, used when lance and sword had both been broken or lost, when you were in the melee and saw a sudden opening, or if you were legitimately skilled enough to use a second blade in tandem with your first. Such a weapon being enchanted for extra punch would be one thing, but this blade feels like it's seen considerable use."
So, either the wielders were very unlucky with their other weapons and had no choice but to use this dagger often, or its frequent use was very deliberate. Factor in the thing's ability to slip past notice... yeah, that is kind of concerning.
Set next to the dagger is a mace. While it is a one-handed weapon like Greenspeaker's Shatterstick, it's made almost entirely of metal, from the top of its eight-flanged head to the butt of the leather-wrapped handle, and while it is infused with spiritual power, the energy in question lacks the wildness of the druid's work, instead having much more in common with Olga's Sword. Conjuration and Summoning Magic radiate steadily from within the crushing weapon, telling you of positive energy turned to an aggressive purpose and a weapon meant to strike things normally untouchable.
It seems like whoever made the mace was fairly serious about having it be a ghost-killing weapon, which readily explains how they might have crossed paths with the Quincy - unlike a lot of this other stuff, if you're being honest. That said, the mace offers another question: why weren't the Wandenreich using it? You can think of a few possibilities, like them having too much respect for its former owner to take the weapon up after that person's passing, or, conversely, because they considered the magical mace inferior to their spirit weapons, but...
Last and not least is one of the tallest weapons you've seen today, a polearm with a seven-foot-long haft and another foot and a half of single-edged curved blade fixed in a socket at the top of the pole.
Looking at it, your first thought is, "Sword-on-a-stick," and no sooner has the phrase crossed your mind than you recall the taste of possibly-not-meat sausages and look over your shoulder for Sam Dibbler.
The glaive, as Ambrose identifies it, is another weapon with a fairly aggressive aura, although unlike most of the others you've encountered today, it doesn't feel particularly hateful of anyone or anything. It's more eager than angry, as though the weapon enjoys cutting things and does so with enthusiasm.
...at least it likes its work?
Shadow Alex casts the spell and learns that the dagger is another heirloom weapon, like the Blade of Olga, only of less upright origins and descent. Its original owner was an Eleventh Century knight with a reputation for a certain pragmatism. He was the sort who kept the letter of his vows while bending the spirit of them when it was profitable and no one would suspect; he protected his vassals with one hand and took heavy taxes with the other; and he tolerated no pagan, heretic, witch, or monster on his lands, unless they were sworn to his service.
It was one such spellcaster that originally created this dagger for his liege-lord, imbuing it with the usual increased accuracy, cutting power, and durability, as well as a simple piece of Illusion Magic to make the blade unremarkable to observers.
The knight did kill with the dagger on several occasions, most of them seizing battlefield opportunities such as Ambrose described, and once or twice as a weapon of last resort. Only once did he take a life in a manner that would have been considered dishonorable, and that was when he killed a ne'er-do-well-
You look over Shadow Alex's shoulder at that, but yes, that's the phrase written in the Book.
-that had stolen into his family's keep bent on "who knew what mischief."
In actuality, the intruder was an agent of the knight's who knew too much of his employer's questionable deeds and had unwisely tried to use that information to blackmail the noble.
While the knight's son inherited the dagger when his father passed, he favored the weapons he already owned, and put his father's blade on display alongside his armor, sword, and shield. The knife was later claimed by the original knight's grandson, who knocked over the set while playing as a child and, while trying to put it back together, realized that what he'd taken for a small piece of dislodged armor was in fact a dagger - one that his father, when he scolded the boy for his carelessness, did not seem to see.
Live steel in the hands of a young child without proper discipline is a recipe for disaster, and this case was no exception. Rather than hurting himself, however, the successor proved to have an aptitude for the use of small blades, as well as for finding things to use them on. Initially limiting himself to cutting food and defacing items of cloth and wood, all too soon the boy grew curious to see what a knight's weapon would do to living flesh and began to trap small animals and birds to "play" with.
"I don't like where this is going," Briar notes grimly.
When he grew older and his greater responsibilities began to take up too much time for him to catch the little beasts himself, the boy thought to have his manservant attend to it - only for that servant to threaten to speak to his lord about his heir's disturbing hobby.
"I mean, I REALLY don't like it."
And so, in unknowing emulation of his grandfather, when confronted by a disloyal servant, the boy made use of the knife that had so helpfully gone unnoticed until it was drawn. Also like his grandfather, the young killer managed to avoid falling under suspicion - but unlike his forebear, who had considered his one act of murder to be an unfortunate necessity, the half-grown noble found it to be a pleasant one.
Over the next few years, the young heir became well-known for his dedication to duty and leisure alike, traveling the length and breadth of the fief and neighboring domains in the pursuit of both. When working, he would see to the needs of the villages and townships, gather taxes and settle local disputes with a firm but fair hand, and skillfully negotiate with his peers and significant tenants over matters of contested borders, resource claims, or mystical importance. When at play, he pursued hunting, feasting, song, and contests of arms and wits with equal fervor, praising those who outmatched him as much as he reveled in his own victories.
And every so often, sometimes shortly before the young lord's arrival, at others during his stay, and occasionally following his departure, a peasant or townsman would go missing. Some were found later, dead of knife-wounds and carved up; others were never seen again. Now and then, a traveler would set out and never arrive at their destination, despite a lack of known bandits or great beasts along the route they'd claimed to be taking. And once, near the end of it all, an old witch's grandson who'd been known to inherit a measure of her gift met his end - only for his soul to be called upon by his mourning granny, mother, and twin sister.
The wrath of one witch wronged can be a terrible thing. Three, bound by blood and vengeance?
The only reason that the murderous young lord did not die immediately was because the witches, their patron, and the dead souls on whose behalf they were acting wanted the wretch to suffer as much as possible for his crimes. And suffer he did, invisible blades carving his flesh with wounds that no other could see, which caused him the greatest pain by striking at the body's weakest and most sensitive points - places he himself knew well, having explored and exploited them in his most favored pastime - and yet drawing not a drop of blood.
Though he understood that he had been cursed and moreover who the culprits must be, the afflicted noble could do nothing to save himself. His pain was such that he could not travel, and whenever he attempted to utter or write so much as a word against the witches, the pain intensified, robbing him of speech and literacy both until he abandoned the attempt. A similar thing occurred when, in desperation, he attempted to turn his trusty knife upon himself. Only the prayers of the family priest offered a glimmer of hope, as it was declared that all the young man needed to do to be freed of his curse was to repent, confess his sins, and do penance - and surely, so upstanding and dutiful a son had nothing to fear?
Perhaps he did fear the consequences, or perhaps he could not conceive that the things he had done WERE sinful. Maybe he simply refused to bow before a higher power. Regardless of the reason, the nobleman refused to seek forgiveness until the pain drove him to madness, and then to death.
The dagger had been on or close to its murderous master for the entirety of his last days, and its exposure to the "curse of blades unseen," cast as it was by the blood-kin of its last and magically gifted victim, touched the weapon's own magic. It became at once harder to notice and yet all the deadlier when it was revealed, spilling the blood of men more easily than many weapons supposedly its superior.
Following the death of its murderous master, the dagger was found by and kept as a memento by his younger sister-
"How did she find it?" Urahara wonders.
"There are a few outstanding possibilities," Ambrose states. "First, and most likely, the dagger's perception-deflecting enchantment may wear off under certain circumstances, such as the death of its recognized owner. Second, and almost as likely, the young lady in question may simply have been able to see the weapon for some reason - sharp eyes and a strong will, a bit of magic of her own, or the involvement of a third party. Third, and least likely by a fair margin - though still far from impossible - the blade may have WANTED to be found."
The Shinigami scientist glances sidelong at the dagger. "...doesn't FEEL like it has its own spirit..."
"Magic weapons with souls are put together differently than ones which are 'merely' intelligent," the wizard says. "This dagger doesn't match to either category, though, it's 'just' magical - but that's enough by itself to make things happen, sometimes."
-who never used it herself, and later passed the blade down to her firstborn son. The weapon remained in that family line for several generations, most often serving as a mark of status and defensive weapon and occasionally being employed in war. It was responsible for only two more unlawful killings in this period, which are glossed over as "heat of the moment" incidents more akin to the original wielder's killing of his would-be blackmailer than the murderous cruelty of his grandson.
Then came the Black Death, which reached the family's holdings in 1348.
Family and fief were both decimated by the plague, and further damage was done as some of the domain's supernatural residents became restive: a family of werewolves long retained as guardians of the nearby forest seemingly began attacking any and all who approached them; several witches were forced to defend themselves and their families from mobs of sick, terrified townsfolk that blamed them as the source of the disease; a seemingly ordinary man descended from a supernatural bloodline awoke the power of a sorcerer even as he lay dying, rising from his sickbed as a mad, ravaged, not-quite-undead beacon of pestilence; and others besides.
Assailed by these clear mystical threats, the aging lord turned to what magical resources he had that remained "loyal" and leveraged them to resolve those problems that were within his ability to address. Rallying what men he could, the lord rode out to deal with the witches first: two were successfully recruited in exchange for the promise of their family's safety; another received a mercy-kill, when the lord arrived to find her dying amid the remains of her home; and the last was put down after she attacked his party outright. With the witches' aid-
"Heart of the Metal?" you guess.
"Maybe just 'Heart of Silver,' from the look of it," Shadow Alex replies.
-the werewolves were dealt with next, though the attacks turned out to be the work of just one rogue, driven mad by his own sickness and the deaths of his wife and unborn child. That were died on the point of the lord's magically silvered dagger, and the surviving members of his pack reaffirmed their loyal to their lord and joined him in the subsequent hunt for the mad sorcerer, who by that point had killed three villages and raised the residents as plague zombies. The cost of dealing with that threat was high, but the lord ultimately returned home victorious, and with the additional deaths of supernaturally empowered humans - and things that had at least BEEN human, not long prior - completing the empowerment of his blade.
The dagger was then handed down to the lord's son and grandson, both of whom would go on to use it in battle when they sought to improve their family's shattered fortunes by taking part in the ongoing Hundred Years' War. The enchanted blade helped its wielders survive those parts of the conflict they fought in, its obscurity and thirst for human blood allowing it to slip past defenses of all sorts to find its mark.
A few more generations of relative disuse followed, and then the dagger was taken up by a scion of the house whose mother was the non-practicing daughter of the last living witch in the domain. Fascinated by magic, the boy would often visit his grandmother to hear stories about it and the wider world of the supernatural, with the hope of learning enough to become a practitioner himself. He had no real talent for his grandmother's arts, however, a fact that angered him and drove him to seek other sources of information and power; in time, he became a warlock, one that had learned how to combine his magical skills with his family's tradition of martial prowess wielding sword and armor in tandem with spellcraft to deadly effect in battle. He also revived his bloodline's lesser tradition of murder, empowering himself through a series of ritual sacrifices - somewhat ironically NOT using his bloodstained ancestral dagger in the process, as the goal was to increase his PERSONAL power, not that of his tools.
It was this malevolent mage-knight who encountered the Wandenreich in 1523. His ongoing hunt for new sources of power had led him to the Earthbound Quincy some years earlier, and he had been trying to adapt his sacrificial rituals to work on Quincy powers, capturing and killing several of their number in failed attempts. The sudden arrival of a strike team from Silbern suggests that the warlock might have been getting close to success, but it also brought a quick end to his ambitions and his life, with his weapons and armor being among the spoils taken back to the frozen fortress, where they were put on display and - appropriately enough - eventually forgotten about.
Has the story of the Forgotten Dagger changed your mind about keeping it?
And do you have any other thoughts or comments on this bloody history?
While it has a rather nasty history behind it, the dagger isn't actually cursed or evil in and of itself, and it's also not the first dedicated manslayer that you've seen today, even if it does lack the nonlethal setting that was included on La Renarde's Goodnight Kiss. You also want to take a closer look at that attention-deflecting enhancement.
As such-
Gained Forgotten Dagger
-you pocket the weapon, after making sure to sheath it.
Once again, Shadow Alex sets up to cast the Spell of Literary Vision, and once again, you learn that the weapon being studied is of European and knightly origins.
It's not another family heirloom, but rather a piece that once belonged to another knightly brotherhood, the Brotherhood of the Order of St. Joseph of Arimathea, which was founded for the specific purpose of hunting all manner of undead things and laying them properly to rest. The emphasis, the Book notes, is on "properly," for while most corporeal specimens among the restless dead can be dealt with via judicious application of violence and many a haunting spirit can be successfully exorcised, there remain many ghosts, revenants, and rarer entities that will inevitably return if the grudges tying them to this world are not correctly identified and addressed.
That said, this mace was meant for violence from the outset, having been crafted in the wake of the Black Death by a member of the Brotherhood who'd retired from field duty after seeing more than one plague victim rise to spread another kind of terror among those who had barely survived the disease itself.
"How common was that?" you ask.
"The Death itself wasn't magical, if that's what you were wondering," Ambrose replies clinically. "Then again, it hardly needed to be. So many people dying in such a relatively short span of time had a huge impact on magical fields across the continent and further afield, which took decades to level off. Necromancy in general was easier to work in the afflicted areas, spells meant to spread sickness, suffering, and death or to raise the dead all enjoyed abnormal effectiveness, and of course, there was an excess of dead bodies to work with, more than anyone could hope to keep track of. Combined with the widespread belief that the end of the world had come and the fact that necromancers can resist, control, and even kill diseases, and their numbers basically exploded
"That sort of environment made it easier and more likely for ghosts and other forms of undead to manifest," Balthazar adds grimly, "and the ones that would have risen even without the help came out more powerful. Various demons flourished and some even crossed over to our dimension specifically to enjoy the devastation and help it along; others, like the common corpse-demon vampire, actually suffered a decline. The collapse of the human population threatened to starve the vampiric population and led to all sorts of internal struggles: masters executed their spawn to preserve their food supply; minions desperately tried to overthrow their makers; and rival nests warred over territory even as they tore themselves apart."
...silver linings?
"No," Balthazar replies, shaking his head.
Gained European History E (Plus) (Plus) (D corpse-demons)
Holy orders were not spared the ravages of the Black Death, as many of their number sought to care for the sick and the dying, and so it was that when the retired knight forged his legacy, there were far fewer hands and minds available to aid him in the task than there would have been just a decade earlier. This resulted in the weapon being much less powerful than its maker had planned - barely any more noteworthy than the random collection of blades and bits you stowed earlier - but by using the steel from weapons he'd wielded against the undead before and during the plague, the knight was able to imprint a general sense of his original intent for the weapon upon it. Combined with years and then decades of rigorous use by the Brothers that followed, this allowed the mace's powers to develop in a more deliberate and controlled fashion than the other "field built" weapons you've studied today. Eventually it grew from an unremarkable magical weapon to one worthy of its maker's goal, and the name he bestowed upon it:
Beatus Requiem.
There is a fairly extensive list of names associated with the mace, significant undead ranging from major corpse-demons and famously nasty and persistent ghosts to undead necromancers and rarer, stranger, more potent things. Your Shadow counts sixty-four in all, plus "innumerable lesser spawn of the grave."
Given the Arimatheans' focus on combating the undead, it isn't surprising that they would eventually encounter the Quincy. Where the Knights of Byzantium had immediately declared a Quincy using her powers to be a heretical imposter fit only to be smote, the Brothers of St. Joseph had a much more amicable and longer-lasting relationship with the spirit-archers, at least the Earthbound families who resided in or near the Order's areas of greatest strength. This led to several of the knights and monks standing alongside the Earthbound Quincy when the Shinigami descended to purge them from the world most of two centuries ago. The Requiem's last wielder was among those, and he did honor to the principles of his Order by attempting to parley rather than immediately resort to violence.
One of the Shinigami had no patience for talking with mortal humans and cut the knight down - only to have his skull shattered in return, as mace and wielder alike expressed their displeasure at such disgraceful conduct. Hostilities erupted in earnest then, and the Josephite fell, taking one more "pagan death god" with him.
After the battle, the Wandenreich retrieved the Requiem, partly for study - as any weapon capable of killing soul reapers was worth at least one look - and partly to serve as the memorial you found it as - because again, any weapon capable of killing Shinigami had earned some respect!
Feeling no particular discomfort about the spiritually empowered mace, you pocket it.
Gained Beatus Requiem
"Did you want to study this mace, Urahara?" you ask. "What with the whole..." - you slowly swing your empty hand towards his head, fingers clenched as if holding something to bludgeon the Shinigami - "...thing?"
"I think I HAVE to take a look," he admits frankly, "given how it's one of the weapons you've said got stronger by killing things, and how it was used against Shinigami."
Oh. Yes, the possibility of the Requiem turning into a Shinigami-bane weapon WOULD be a potential worry for him, wouldn't it? Likewise for Olga's Sword.
"It would... probably take more than one or two fights like that to empower a weapon," you muse, before turning to Ambrose and Balthazar. "Right?"
"It really depends on the circumstances," the wizard replies, shaking his head. "How powerful the weapon is, what it can already do, and what its accumulated history is like; what the wielder is like; what they're fighting and how badly one side outclasses the other; and so on."
You nod, accepting the "signs unclear, try again later" answer and turning back to the shopkeeper. "Make a list of whatever stuff you're interested in looking at, and we'll work out a loan schedule later."
"And a payment plan?" Urahara guesses.
"My rates are very reasonable," you return.
Rather than try to maneuver a seven-foot pole with a big sharp blade on the end around in what is still a fairly crowded room, Shadow Alex relocates the Goddess figurines before casting Literary Vision again.
The strangely eager glaive had its origins in the mid-Fourteenth Century, when it was created for one of the officers of the Band of Blue, a mercenary troop taking part in the then-ongoing Hundred Years' War. At this time, it was a mundane weapon, however well-made, and was present for and wielded in several battles between ordinary men. Its original owner is noted to have been a skilled wielder, capable of cutting down two men with one stroke on a fairly regular basis.
Given the nature of the world you live in, it wasn't unusual for mercenary bands of the day to have humans with monstrous or demonic heritage in their ranks, or even for full monsters or demons to be welcome and accepted among their brothers-in-arms. The glaive's master was not one of these, which made his feats somewhat more impressive, especially when he managed to defeat and kill a number of supernatural opponents.
Following the end of that phase of the long-running conflict, many mercenary units were dismissed from service and promptly turned to banditry. The Band of Blue were not among these, as when their contract with their current employer was up, the baron in question offered them a new deal to supplement his household troops and help defend his home territory from marauders. With little other work to be had and room and board being included, the Band took the deal, and over the next four years they drove off or hunted down more than twenty different bandit troops that attempted to pillage that barony. Most of these were small raids of no more than a couple dozen men, but the Band of Blue fought peer units near a hundred strong on three separate occasions.
By the end of their contract, a third of the Band that had survived the war were dead, and many of the survivors had developed strong ties to their current place of residence and were content to either retire there or continue working for the baron. "Captain Clay," as the glaive's master had by then become known-
"Kind of an odd name, isn't it?" your Shadow wonders.
"A dangerous one for a man living and working in France at that time," Balthazar adds, "considering that it's an English name."
"It might have been derived from his weapon," Ambrose replies. "The prevailing linguistic theory has the term 'glaive' descending from the Latin 'gladius,' for 'sword' - specifically a SHORT sword, for full irony - but it may also have come from the Celtic 'cladivos,' which was the origin of 'claymore.'"
And a claymore is certainly much closer to the length and mass of this kind of weapon than a short sword, you follow.
"Also," Briar notes, "it's alliterative."
-was among those who settled down, starting a family and eventually passing his weapon and the tricks he'd learned for using it down to his son. When the third and final phase of the Hundred Years' War began some twenty years later, a second-generation Band of Blue marched out to face it under Captain Clay the Younger, who'd enlisted the sons of many previous members, other local boys, a few of the youngest of the human "old-timers," and a fair number of the previous hybrid and inhuman members. This mix of youth and experience served the Band well, and the unit would fight regularly and well for at least the next fifteen years, which was when Clay the Younger was killed. The glaive was then picked up by one of the demonic members of the Band as a memento of her two captains; it remained in her possession for the next century, more a trophy of "the good old days" than a serious weapon, although she did apparently use it to kill the late Fifteenth Century demonic equivalent of a gang lord and his bodyguards.
Eventually, the demoness - who still worked as a mercenary - was hired to fight in the Thirty Years' War. As the modern battlefield had largely become the domain of the gun and cannon, she did not bring the glaive with her, and it was subsequently stolen by an unidentified party in her absence. What happened to it after that is not mentioned until 1657, when the weapon turned up in the hands of a former independent vampire hunter turned vampire hunter-hunting vampire. Said creature tried to take out a Quincy and was eliminated in short order, leaving only the glaive behind; the weapon subsequently made its way to the collection in Silbern.
Gained Captain Clays' Glaive
With the last of your cut of the weapons handled, you retrieve and stow the focuses and remaining materials for the Spell of the Literary Vision. In passing, you note that the box of Gold Shadow Incense is bearing up well enough, and that the first Conjured Shadow Book has pages yet to spare - you remind yourself again to copy the accumulated stories into a more stable medium, and sooner rather than later.
As previously suggested by Ambrose, everyone files out of the weapons locker and back down the hall to the spellcasting chamber, where you get out the Staff of Wind - or maybe you should be calling it the Staff of Whistles? One is more dignified, but the other seems more accurate...
Anyway, for the sake of the scientific method - and because your personal previous examination of the item will have biased your basic Divination spells - you let Shadow Alex run the usual series of tests using the Spell of Identification. Standing in the circle in the center of the room, he squints at the staff, measuring it from end to end with glowing eyes, then gives it a spin, which he pauses at what you're pretty sure is EXACTLY the same point you did when it starts to whistle. Then he squints at it again for a bit before making a few full turns.
"Weird design choice," he finally delivers his verdict, after bringing the weapon to a complete halt. "Maybe we're missing the cultural reference that would make it make sense?" he offers to you with a shrug.
You return the gesture in kind. You don't know anything more about it than he does.
"Still, if I'm reading it correctly - and even with this thing running on ki instead of mana, I think I am - it seems to be pretty straightforward." He takes a stance, holding the staff before him with both hands and facing away from the rest of you. "You spin the staff" - he does so, the whistling resuming and picking up in pitch as the length of wood accelerates - "get it up to speed, exert your will-"
The whistling is suddenly and briefly drowned out as a horizontal column of air five feet across ROARS across the other side of the chamber to slam into the far wall. There's nothing in the way of the sudden gust to be sent flying, and the wall doesn't so much as creak at the impact - in fact, it isn't even touched by the wind, a field of faint, green-tinted energy shimmering into existence with a bell-like chime just before the angry air would have made contact with the wall.
As quickly as it came, the blast of air dies down.
"What do you think?" Ambrose asks. "Fifty miles per hour?"
"Seems like a standard Spell to Create a Gust of Wind," Balthazar replies with a tone of agreement.
"What rank would that spell be?" Urahara inquires.
"Second circle for wizards, sorcerers, druids, and styles specializing in the Element of Wind."
"Tactical support rather than direct damage?"
"As a rule, yes," Balthazar agrees. "Unless or until you manage to put the all-consuming swarm of demonic insects chasing you between you and a stone wall, anyway."
Urahara pauses at that. "That is a curiously specific example."
"Myanmar, 1927," Balthazar sighs. "A demon with a fascination for entomology was collecting amber fossils of Hell ants, to try and revive the species. He succeeded, they ate him, and then they started in on everything else within flying range."
...
You're really starting to get the impression that Balthazar has a had a lot of uncomfortable run-ins with horrible things over the centuries that he's been alive.
"Anyway," Shadow Alex says somewhat awkwardly, "aside from that once-a-day pocket windstorm, the staff seems to have one other function. I THINK it's supposed to be able to draw on the user's ki to power itself, but I'm not entirely sure."
Oh?
Is there anything else you want to try with the staff, or just say in response to this quick study session?
Also, after lunch, which of the remaining rooms of loot do you want to start with?
You step forward and gesture for your Shadow to hand over the Staff. Your reasoning for this is threefold.
First, your Shadow's "ki" isn't exactly ki, and might interfere with the workings of the item. What form such interference might take, you can't say, but you would rather not risk getting a shiny new... okay, a well-made piece of loot getting jammed up or damaged by having the wrong type of energy channeled through it.
Second, it's just more efficient for you to be the one who performs the experiment. There is undoubtedly something to be learned from the experience of channeling ki through an item empowered by ki, and it's just quicker, easier, and less costly for you to acquire that information directly than it would be to faff about with memory transfers or do everything twice. Plus, you've got ki to burn, and not a lot of other need for it today.
Third, Shadow Alex got to spin the mystical wind-stick once, so now it's your turn.
Your Shadow passes you the ki-staff and steps out of the spellcasting circle. As you step inside the ring, you have the impulse to ask your Dark Self to cast the Spell to Analyze Dweomers, but there's little point in doing so. When it comes to examining magic items, the only things Analyze Dweomer does which a successful casting of the Spell of Identification can't are detecting curses and precisely assessing the remaining charge of items like wands and spell-staves; in every other respect, Analyze Dweomer is really just a faster, more certain, and harder to resist form of Identification.
Setting that aside, you take a stance and start trying to slowly extend the tiniest fraction of your ki into the Staff.
On your first attempt, you use Ki Projection. You're fairly sure that this actually WON'T work, and sure enough, the energy bound up in the Staff doesn't so much as react to the wisps of energy that spread out from your fingers and palms, flowing across the smooth wooden haft for a short distance before dispersing into the air.
With that confirmed as the incorrect approach, you turn to Ki Infusion, attempting to inject the energy directly - and this time, there is a response, the Staff tugging at the trickle of power you're outputting. Because you're trying to move your energy into and through a weapon that's already filled with oddly rigid ki and also aren't sure exactly what this is supposed to feel like, the flow is sluggish and uneven at first, and also clearly not strong enough to activate the Staff's wind-generating power.
So, you use a little more ki, and then a little more again-
!
-and then you start in surprise as the weapon suddenly goes from resisting your ki infusion to drinking it in. You spin the Staff quickly, exert your will, and-
*Whoosh!*
-another small, short-lived, horizontal cyclone whirls across Ambrose's chamber, to be absorbed by the force-field covering the far wall.
"...successful test?" Briar queries, after the wind has died down.
"I think so," you reply. "Just let me try that again to confirm..."
This time, instead of gently ramping up the power, you dump the same amount of ki into the staff all at once - and the staff takes it in readily and gives you another gale-force gust.
"Did that seem a bit stronger to you?" Ambrose asks Balthazar.
"Maybe more focused? We'd need an anemometer to be sure."
"I think I do have one in storage..."
While they're discussing possible additional tests, you give the staff another spin and a mental push, but nothing happens. Given how it reacted to having your ki injected - first ignoring the lesser amounts that weren't sufficient to activate its power, and then taking everything it could the moment you crossed that critical threshold - as well as the fact that its ki signature keeps returning to the same level after creating that blast of air, you think you can safely say that the Staff isn't capable of storing the ki you provide it. You're not actually recharging it like this, you're acting as an external power source.
You'll try not to feel too used.
Gained Hurricane Quarterstaff
You're about to put the Quarterstaff away when a thought occurs: what would happen if you Overloaded the ki you were infusing into the weapon?
And then that thought is nearly rear-ended by another: what if you tried using your Wind Palm technique to empower the Hurricane Staff?
After a moment, you decide to attempt the latter first, as it's least likely to have any negative effects. Renewing your grip on the Staff, you try to focus your ki as though you were about to perform a Wind Palm, only to push the energy into the wooden weapon in your hands rather than into the air around it. You use enough energy in the process to trigger the Staff's Gust of Wind power-
*Whoosh!*
-but it doesn't seem any different to your senses than the previous burst.
You aren't sure why you were expecting anything different. Unlike that kid Lee who was chucking ki-based fireballs around at the World Tournament, your Wind Palm doesn't actually give your ki an elemental aspect - it just interacts with the air that's already present. Maybe a more refined form of the skill would do what you're picturing, but as it is, you're just using ordinary ki, and less efficiently than you could.
For your next attempt, you try reaching out to the wooden weapon not through the palms of your hands, but by taking "the long way" and going through the air around it, to see if that lets your life-energy absorb some trace of elemental energy.
This also fails to work. You've never tried channeling ki into something at one remove like this - it's always been a direct transference from you to your target - and by the time the energy gets to the "other side" of the air, you can't control it.
Whether that's a flat impossibility or just something you aren't skilled enough to manage yet, you can't say, and nobody else in the room knows quite enough about the mechanics of ki use to be certain. Ambrose, Balthazar, and Urahara all agree that it sounds doable in theory, the question is the practicality of it.
You make a mental note to talk to Lu-sensei.
Next, you give an Overloaded Ki Infusion a try-
*Whoosh!*
-but the only effect it seems to have is to add the slightest off-pitch warble to the Staff's whistling spin. When you take another look at the weapon afterwards, it's not damaged, but your sense of the ki imbued into it suggests a slight strain from forcing more energy through the thing than it was meant to handle at one time.
Probably best not to do that again, at least not today - which rules out an Overloaded "Wind Ki Infusion Palm."
This time, you put the Hurricane Quarterstaff away for real, and everyone leaves the chamber for-
"Hey, where ARE we going to sit down?" your Shadow wonders abruptly. "Or are we not trying to keep secrets from Altria, Lucia, and Anna anymore...?"
"I was going to have lunch brought to the sitting room," Ambrose replies. "Altria and Anna are having so much fun trying to question, infiltrate, or otherwise spy on the goings on of our little workforce, I haven't the heart to interrupt them."
...now, is that "fun" in the normal sense of "enjoyable entertainment," or is it "fun" in the sense of "suffering existential despair while everything is on fire"?
"That would be telling."
Hmmm.
While you are leaning slightly more towards keeping the joke going, you feel like you could go either way on the subject. In the end, you decide to leave it up to fate, chance, and the Goddesses, and get out a gold coin.
"Heads, we eat with everyone else," you declare. "Tails, we eat in."
"No cheating," Shadow Alex adds, glancing around with a warning frown.
Ambrose raises his hands and affects a look of wounded innocence. "Moi?"
Your Dark Self's frown intensifies.
You flip the coin into the air-
*Ting*
-catch it with your right hand as it comes down, and clap it onto the back of your left.
...
"Looks like we're eating in," you declare.
With that, you adjourn to the sitting room. The furniture has been rearranged ahead of time, plush armchairs and side tables removed and replaced by a circular dining table with enough seats about it for... eight people?
"Are we expecting someone else?" you ask, as the Briars take their human forms.
"Probably not," Ambrose replies, "but one is never quite sure."
As you take a seat, you note that the chamber isn't really built for this many guests at once: even with the usual seats removed, the bookcases and other knick-knacks lining the walls take up a fair bit of the available space; the area before the fireplace needs to be left clear, if only for the sake of comfort; and the current furnishings take up enough of the remaining space that pulling chairs out far enough to actually sit in them is a bit of an exercise in frustration.
In a different home, you might wonder how the table even got IN this room, as it's too big to fit through the door, but "Ambrose" is answer enough.
While you're sorting out the seating, a few of the household staff come down the hall with two wheeled serving trays between them, which prove to be carrying soup, sandwiches, salad, and drinks. Moving smoothly and without trouble in the limited space, the servers form something of a human conveyor belt, one of them remaining in the hall to pass plates, glasses, the big soup bowl whose name escapes you-
"Tureen," Briar advises.
-and other things from the carts to the next in line, who passes them on to the lady that actually sets the table. The nature of the meal is self-serve - you aren't sure if the servants are used to that or resigned to it, but their unbroken professional manner suggests that either way, it's not a new phenomenon for them where the wizard is concerned - and once everything is in place, the staff excuse themselves, leaving you to eat, drink, and chat over the meal.
You have a few topics of discussion in mind, but you wait a bit to let the older men at the table get a few bites to eat, and to see if the flow of conversation will give you a natural opportunity to segue into what you wanted to talk about.
"So," Ambrose says after a time, "how are you two holding out on the mana front? Think you'll have enough left to finish reading the secret histories of the things that interest you today?"
"It depends on how many really interesting items there are in my share of the loot," you answer. "We've got, what, three more rooms to go through?"
"Armor, the collection of Wands and such, and the random pile," Ambrose agrees. "You'll definitely find a few things to investigate in the first, and while Wands generally aren't worthy targets for Visions, Rods and Staves are another matter. As for the other stuff... a distinctly mixed bag."
"So, make it two rooms instead of three?" Shadow Alex guesses, while visibly running some calculations in his head. "That much would... probably be doable with another hour or two."
Meaning you might be home in time for breakfast.
You're still feeling that unusual lack of appetite, so you opt to stick with getting yourself a drink.
Shadow Alex seems to feel the same way, whereas the Briars are taking small servings of the salad and splitting a sandwich between them.
"Speaking of intercontinental travel..."
"...I had an interesting discussion with the kami of the Tokyo Tower the other day..."
Your recounting of the suggestion that the Tower had been visited by aliens gets a few nods, which turn to wry chuckles and one outright laugh - from Ambrose - when you mention the group of Tower employees who though that a gateway to realm of the dead had been opened up.
Then you get to the big one: the claim that the group of unnaturally fit and pretty foreign men were clearly some enchantress or fairy queen's personal harem.
For better or worse, Ambrose is neither eating nor drinking anything at that point. It's probably for the better, as he starts laughing so hard that you're a little worried the old man might hurt himself.
Balthazar, on the other hand, chokes on a bite of sandwich and has to take a minute to clear his throat and recover.
As for the Briars, who have heard this before - and had a reaction similar to Ambrose's - they cackle in amusement, but not quite to the doubled-over, unable to speak extent that your partner had been reduced to the first time.
Urahara takes in all the reactions. "...I'm missing something, aren't I?"
Gained Comedy C (Plus)
"It's- it's- the idee-hee-heea of a HAHAHAHAHA!"
"As Ambrose is trying to say," Balthazar rasps, coughing briefly again, "the idea of that particular group of knights as the enthralled harem of an enchantress or Lady of Faerie is..." He pauses and shakes his head. "I'm honestly not sure if crazy, disturbing, or 'likely to get you stabbed for suggesting it' is the most appropriate response. Half of them were RELATED to a woman who fit that description, and there was some bad history involved."
You are somewhat surprised when Urahara doesn't have a eureka moment at that. Either he's VERY unfamiliar with European legends, or, conversely, his knowledge of the field is wide-ranging enough to offer viable alternatives to (what seems to you to be) the obvious answer of the Knights of the Round Table and Morgana le Fay.
"That- that's- it's not the only level the joke works on!" Ambrose manages to get out.
You frown at that yourself, as you aren't quite sure what he's getting at-
A pulse comes down the familiar bond, and you "hear" Briar's voice speaking: "The King."
-oh, right. Arthur was actually a girl, very magically powerful even if not a fully trained spellcaster, and favored by the fairies besides. So, she would have kind of fit the bill, too.
That's... probably not something you should suggest within the King's hearing. Or that of the Knights. At least not until you've seen what they do to Ambrose when he brings it up, as you're sure he inevitably will.
"So, Balthazar..."
Doing your best to put the wheezing wizard out of your mind for the moment, you turn to the senior sorcerer in the room and ask him how his student's progress with ki training has been going - if, indeed, it has "gone" at all.
"It has, actually," Balthazar replies, "although not without some issues."
Oh?
"Well, first of all, there was the need to get Dave into shape. You know Dave, you know how he likes to complain about things-"
He does, a little.
"-so I'm sure you can imagine how he took having to do all that physical exercise on top of his schoolwork and learning sorcery. You haven't met Charles yet, right?"
The martial arts instructor that owed Balthazar a favor and who Lu-sensei approved of as a teacher? No, you have not, although you recall what your own master said about the man having once declared he would take no more students, and how Balthazar called in that outstanding debt to get him to teach Dave.
You can see how a man who wasn't exactly enthusiastic about teaching again might take Dave's attitude poorly.
"It has been a recurring theme with the two of them," Balthazar agrees. "I think they're at the point where they've gotten used to each other, though - mostly, anyway - because Dave is complaining a lot less in or about his workouts than he used to."
The slight emphasis that Balthazar places on one word has you venturing: "JUST the workouts?"
"He's had a good gripe going for the last couple of weeks about ki manipulation," the Merlinean Master replies. "So has Charles, for that matter."
"What's the problem?"
"On Charles's side, it's the fact that learning Merlinean sorcery first made it a lot easier for Dave to access his ki than it otherwise would have been. Charles wasn't expecting Dave to unlock his ki for a few more months, and he'd paced his lesson plan to build up the boy's skills and habits according to that estimate - and then Dave essentially leapt ahead to the advanced material without having learned all of his basics, meaning they're both having to struggle to catch him up to where he should be in other areas before he learns any bad habits."
Okay, you can see how that might annoy a teacher.
"The other thing that has Charles ticked, and Dave as well, is that the boy keeps shooting electrical sparks and discharging static shocks when he tries to express his ki."
"...what."
"At first, Charles said he thought Dave had somehow managed to tap into elemental ki, which was absurd."
You should think so! You haven't even done that yet!
"Then he realized that the boy was just having trouble keeping his mana and his ki separate," Balthazar states. "So, now both of them are a bit put out with me for my contribution to the current problem, and not warning them that it might happen."
"But you aren't a ki-user," you point out.
"Which is why Charles, at least, is only a BIT put out with me. Dave, meanwhile, is taking the excuse to gripe and grumble in my direction for all it's worth."
You wonder why Dave hasn't mentioned this in his letters. Then again, the last one you received from him was just written a couple of weeks ago, so it might have been before this problem started - or at least before it became significant.
You're probably going to be too busy in the coming year to be popping back and forth between New York for the specific purpose of being Dave's ki-training buddy. Likewise, extending your periodic visits to the Big Apple to give your fellow kung fu sorcerer in the making some intensive additional instruction in keeping ki and mana separate isn't really in the cards.
But dropping some tips by mail or taking a few minutes out of a visit to provide a quick demonstration and then see what Dave's doing in turn, whether right, wrong, or just different from your own approach? That's viable.
So, you make the offer to lend Dave your insights.
"He would probably appreciate that," Balthazar says.
You nod and remind yourself to see to that later.
Glancing at Ambrose - who has stopped guffawing and wheezing all over the table, but is still snickering, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, and just generally sorting himself out after a good laugh - you decide to turn the conversation to Urahara.
"So, Urahara. With all the recent excitement, I haven't had the chance to ask the Kurosakis if they were ready to get in touch with Navi about healing and purifying Masaki and Isshin. Have they spoken to you about it?"
"They haven't," the shopkeeper replies, "or at least, they haven't recently. I think you were informed that they were considering paying Lady Navi with a split of Earthly materials and then undertaking a Quest or a Trial?"
That was the last you'd definitively heard on the matter, yes, but that was the same day Souken explained who and what Yhwach was for you. You've been rather... preoccupied... since then.
"Who hasn't?" Urahara asks. "With everything that's been going on, I'd be surprised if they were willing to do anything until after Soul Society finally stands down the heightened patrols in Karakura. Possibly not until they've tracked down that private eye that was spying on the girls and had a few words with him."
Ah, so he's had that meeting, then?
He nods. "Isshin came in and asked if I could get him a memory modifier."
...
What.
"That was my initial reaction, too," Urahara admits. "Then he explained why he wanted one."
"...alright, what are they plotting?"
You try not to sigh as you say it, or at least, no more than is merited.
"Nothing permanent," Urahara replies lightly. "There'd be no point in having the memory modifier if they were going to leave that sort of evidence, now would there?"
That statement doesn't particularly reassure you, mainly because: "Isshin's a doctor."
"And a trained Shinigami healer, besides," the shopkeeper readily admits, following your line of thought. "But even with the exercise he got on your little tropical island getaway, he's not up to using healing kido yet, so there's a limit to how much damage he could cover up."
"But how much could he CAUSE?" Briar points out. "Because I may not be trained to local modern standards, but I can still think of a number of things a doctor or healer could do to make a patient's time with them VERY uncomfortable, without any long-term issues."
For all that she started out seemingly speaking in support of one of your concerns, your partner sounded suspiciously eager all through that - and this isn't even her Shadow talking, this is all Original Briar.
It would seem that she isn't terribly happy about someone spying on the Kurosaki twins, either. In and of itself, that isn't surprising; what IS surprising is how Briar hadn't said anything on the matter before.
"It wasn't my place to say anything until Isshin and Masaki decided what they were going to do," Briar says, as if responding to your thoughts - which, given the familiar bond, she undoubtedly is. "Their family, their call. That said, if they really have decided to make the creep regret his life choices - or at least his decisions about what jobs he takes - I am completely supportive and willing to offer ideas they may not have considered."
"Hear, hear," the Shadows chorus.
Because, yeah, YOU aren't exactly thrilled by the knowledge that somebody was spying on Yuzu and Karin, either. You're just polite enough not to bring it up... for some of the same reasons that Briar didn't, admittedly...
"I will... pass that on," Urahara says after a moment.
You don't miss the fact that he hasn't actually answered your original question about what Isshin and Masaki are planning to do to Grandmaster Haschwalth's hired detective, but there was a certain polite finality in Urahara's last remark that tells you he's probably not going to give you that answer if he can help it. Whether he's protecting the Kurosakis' privacy, trying to give them (or himself) some deniability, or something else, you couldn't say, but you decide to let it go.
You can always ask Isshin and Masaki about it directly the next time you visit, if you're that curious.
In any case, you see that Ambrose has recovered from his near fit of laughter, and you decide to give him another ten minutes or so to catch up on the light dining and light conversation that he missed in his amusement. Once that time is up and the current discussion has ended, you take the opportunity to bring the talk around to the subject of the Memorian Base, with its workshops and ward structures.
Ambrose nods. "Yes, they were something to see, weren't they? A testament to the sort of thing that could be done with magic if it wasn't stuck in the shadows..."
You blink, caught off guard. "You've been there already?"
"Your ghostly friends needed a few fresh reagents for their clean-up procedures and the rites the good priest will be conducting," the wizard replies. "They asked Roderick, he called me, and the two of us" - he gestures between himself and Balthazar - "took a little break to deliver the goods and play tourist."
Oh. Well, then.
"Did anything in particular catch your eye or give you ideas?" you ask the two elder arcanists.
"Yes, but probably not in the manner you're thinking, lad," Ambrose replies, sipping at his drink. "The Memorians didn't have anything that Balthazar and I haven't seen a time or ten before-"
"At least not in the areas they were willing to let us see," Blake adds.
"Yes, quite," the wizard agrees. "One of the drawbacks of being the allies of an ally, rather than a direct ally yourself. As I was saying, we didn't really see anything new in terms of spellcraft, whether it was by the standards of the day or the advancements made since then, and even the base itself wasn't something beyond either of our means to reproduce or improve upon, given time and funding. The impressive part came from knowing that the place WASN'T the work of a single archmage and a few capable apprentices, that it was just one of a NUMBER of similar strongholds the Memorians maintained, and that they'd had the manpower and organization to make all of that possible. With monstrous support, no less. It just... it makes an old man wonder, is all, what the world might be like today if things had gone differently, way back when. If Rome hadn't fallen, or the supernatural hadn't been forced underground."
That is perhaps a more philosophical answer than you were expecting to hear in reply to your question, especially from Ambrose, but in hindsight, you can see where he's coming from. He DID used to be Merlin, after all, and even if you aren't privy to the details of how he reincarnated, resurrected, or otherwise crossed the fifteen-hundred-year gap between King Arthur's reign and the Twentieth Century, the fact remains that the wizard's first lifetime was spent in the declining shadow of the Roman Empire.
They wouldn't have been a legend or ancient history to him, not then, and possibly not even now.
More than that, though, when you take what you know of the Roman Empire and compare it with what you know of the Memorians, you can understand why Ambrose sounds a little maudlin. Rome was GOOD at taking ideas other people had come up with and adapting them to their own uses - one need look no further than the near-wholesale adoption of the Olympian pantheon for evidence of that - and at its height, the Empire ruled the entire Mediterranean basin and a significant portion of the adjoining inland territories. That is a considerable amount of land and water to be under one ruling authority, to say nothing of the material resources or the population involved.
What WOULD have happened if that lost Roman legion had emerged from their sojourn in Faerie and found themselves displaced not by centuries, but by a few decades, or even years? What if they'd returned to find Rome much as they'd left it, and managed to have the knowledge they'd won and the allies they'd made accepted by their countrymen? What might a continent-spanning empire have accomplished with legions trained to incorporate magic into their daily lives and the skill to create portals to at least one other world?
...
Actually, you can scratch that last question, because the answer is pretty obvious.
"Alright," you say, shaking your head, "more specifically, did you see anything wrong with the wards in the walls?"
"Nnnnoooo," Ambrose says slowly, with a glance at Balthazar, who shakes his head. "Ought we have?"
You explain about the demonic corruption that you found in some of the major nodes of the base's warding array, ambient taint having "leaked" into outlying parts of the system and then spreading from there.
"Sounds like exactly the sort of thing they wouldn't have wanted to show us," Balthazar notes.
"It does, doesn't it?" Ambrose shakes his head. "Tough luck if that's the case, corruption that old and settled doesn't come out easily, if it does at all."
That's... not what you were hoping to hear.
Lunch ends not too long after that.
After going through all those weapons before lunch, it would seem to be natural for you to spend the time immediately after lunch going through the armor and shields.
Perhaps you're feeling a bit contrary, then, because you opt to visit one of the other storerooms instead.
Where the previous chambers have been relatively neatly organized due to the physical commonalities of their contents, the door that swings open at your approach reveals a kind of muted chaos, scores of items that have little if anything in common with their neighbors alternately hanging from the walls, lined up on shelves, or sitting wherever there was space to be found. There are individual patches of order within the mess, such as the neat rows of bottles, vials, and flasks on shelves to the right or the collection of musical instruments down the way, but even these islands of organization are marred by the unique qualities of their respective contents. No two glass containers seem to be quite the same shape or size, and their contents cover a range of hues - and likely textures and tastes - while all of the instruments seem to be different. Several banners with clashing coats of arms are on display just above what appears to be a collection of rocks, one or two of which might be gems, while the rest just seem to be ordinary stones when looked at with the naked eye.
You're distinctly reminded of Gen's, wherein a similar sort of organized chaos or randomized order can be found. It might be that vague sense of not-quite-familiarity and the number of times you've bought restoratives from your business partner which have you turning to the potions first.
Looking them over, you see that paper tags have been attached to all of the bottles. All of them are labeled with names, of course, and some bear additional characters, like the skull and crossbones hanging off an innocuous-looking plain glass vial of colorless liquid.
"I don't see any healing potions," you note. "Whoops, wait a minute..."
"There's a few of them in there," Ambrose agrees, "but it does appear that the Wandenreich either figured out how to identify healing tonics, anti-toxins, and other common curatives and were making use of them, or else didn't get their hands on many."
You're not sure which possibility would be the more annoying, but either way, it kind of goes against tradition. Aren't you supposed to find healing potions by the half-dozen when you raid an ancient stronghold like Silbern? You're pretty sure that's a rule or something...
Potions being what they are, you aren't expecting to see any valid targets for the Spell of Literary Vision among the lot, and thus are rather surprised to find no less than three such specimens among your cut of the liquid loot.
One of these is a rectangular crystal flask that seems to be using a gemstone for a CORK. The liquid inside is pale blue and radiates a moderate aura of Necromantic Magic, although not of the sort that would make you fear for anyone who drank the stuff or was otherwise exposed to it.
"A Wraith's Sight Elixir," Ambrose informs you. "It renders the drinker blind for half an hour or so, but in exchange, it allows them to perceive life-energy within about thirty feet. Bit of a niche trick, but it can be useful for fighting creatures with gaze attacks."
The next bottle - the stopper for which you note has been sealed with wax - contains an unpleasant-looking mud-colored tonic which bubbles in its flask, and NOT in the manner of carbonated water. This is a slower thing, pockets of gas forming gradually among the thick liquid and not so much rising to the surface as forcing the substance around them to get out of their way, until they breach the upper layer of fluid in greasy bubbles that contest for the limited amount of open space in the top of the flask before inevitably bursting.
As revolting as its contents appear, this vile vial gives off a strong aura of Conjuration Magic, specifically the kind found in healing magic.
"Now, THAT is a restorative our Quincy friends either didn't recognize or couldn't bring themselves to use," Balthazar says. "This is what's known as Trollblood Elixir - and before you ask, Alex, no, it isn't made from actual troll's blood. Or at least, this particular sample wasn't. There HAVE been attempts to brew more... authentic versions, but to the best of my knowledge, they've always ended badly for the brewer or whoever they got to test the stuff."
"Angry trolls?" you guess.
"Sometimes," Balthazar agrees with a nod. "They object to being 'eaten' by anything that wasn't strong enough to at least take a piece out of them in a fight."
Ah. As Grack would say, manners.
"Most of the time, though, it's because trying to ingest any part of a troll is just a bad idea. Most beings' digestive systems aren't made to literally FIGHT their food." He shakes his head. "Anyway, this potion temporarily bestows accelerated healing reasonably comparable to that of a true troll. It only lasts for about a minute, and it can't regrow lost limbs, but it CAN be used to reattach recently severed ones, as long as they weren't too badly damaged in the process."
"Be warned, though," Ambrose chimes in. "The stuff smells like death on the battlefield, it tastes worse, and whoever drinks it will be more or less disabled until it's run its course."
Fair warning, then.
And then there is the squarish bottle of bright pink liquid, which has small things floating in it - insects, you realize, as you peer closer. Wasps, to be precise.
"Elixir of Swarmform," Ambrose says. "Turns the drinker into a swarm of bugs - in this case, wasps - for up to an hour, or until he reverts to normal, whichever comes first. No, I don't know why anyone would want to do that to themselves. No, I don't know why it comes out neon pink."
To date, you've been fortunate to not have had any great need for magical healing - as long as you aren't counting Jasmine's need for a new body, anyway. Resurrection from complete bodily destruction and decay is... somewhat beyond the usual definition of the term "healing," so you think it's fine.
Anyway, when injuries have come up, you have relied mainly on your own magical abilities and Briar's - be they learned or innate - to deal with them. You also have a deal in the works to secure a long-term supply of brews that will, hopefully, be equivalent to Hyrulean Red Potions, which almost certainly outperform most similar concoctions available on Earth.
That said, a minor healing potion you have in-hand when it's needed is more valuable than any number of Red Potions you won't have until months after the fact. With that in mind...
Gained Minor Healing Potion
Gained Moderate Healing Potion
You're honestly curious as to how a single-use consumable like a magic potion could have enough history behind it to be a valid target for the Spell of Literary Vision. Shadow Alex naturally shares this feeling, and quickly sets up for the Divination, placing the Goddess figurines on an open spot on one of the stands in the room.
The Wraith's Sight Elixir was created by an African necromancer who evidently spent a number of years investigating various ancient ruins across the continent. The spell doesn't reveal where he went or what he was looking for, just stating that in between his expeditions, the man made his way in the world by selling his services to interested buyers - of which there was evidently no shortage. From mundane medical care and counsel on untimely deaths to pest control and the provision of a few extra bodies for simple day labor; from the removal of curses or their infliction to speaking with loved ones long gone or straight-up killing hated foes that yet remain; a skilled necromancer has many talents that people would gladly pay for, particularly when he's just passing through and not angling to become a permanent resident.
The Elixir was something that the spellcaster had created for his own use, having found that being able to directly view the flow of life-force could be quite helpful in diagnosing the condition of his patients. This particular flask never saw its intended use, having been one of several dropped by the necromancer when he was attacked by a Quincy about fifteen years ago. The wizard escaped that encounter by the simple expedient of teleporting himself somewhere that the crazy man with the glowing bow and arrows WASN'T, and what happened to him afterwards is not stated. The Elixir was one of several of the man's creations that were taken back to Silbern for examination, eventually ending up in storage because they couldn't find a use for it.
Gaining short-range life-sight at the cost of normal vision WOULD be kind of pointless for a culture focused on long-range combat against angry undead spirits and an order of psychopomps, wouldn't it? Particularly when the people involved can move as fast as you (or your Shadow) have seen.
You live in a dangerous world, and sooner or later, you or somebody you care about is going to get hurt. Best to be prepared.
You aren't sure if the arcanely-granted ability to see life-force is just Ki Sight achieved by a different method, but it's something worth looking into. That said, you might need to hold off on such investigations for a while: Ambrose mentioned that the Elixir could be useful when fighting creatures with gaze attacks; you know that the legendary Medusa is somehow still haunting the city of Fuyuki after the Fourth Holy Grail War; and consequently, you might be better-served by analyzing the contents of this flask to try and reverse-engineer the formula for Wraith's Sight Elixir, so that you can make more of it.
For ideal results, you might have to wait until after you've had your lessons with Vira and have a better idea of what's involved in that sort of work, which could push things back by months or even a couple of years. Then again, it IS a few years before the Fifth Grail War is due, so while important, the task isn't exactly urgent.
Eh, you'll figure it out later.
Gained Wraith's Sight Elixir
Your Shadow fetches the thick glass bottle that contains the Trollblood Elixir and places it within the circle with a faint thump.
The potion before you was created by a devotee of Apollo in the wake of the first World War. One of the more gifted mystical medics of his generation, the man had access to records of the greater magics that had been available in the distant past, and he knew himself to be the lesser to legendary figures such as Asclepios and Medea. While the old stories initially helped to keep him humble, the death toll of the Great War drove the man to despair over the lives that he might have saved, had his faith in his patron and his dedication to the healing arts not been so "weak."
With that in mind, the healer devoted himself to finding a way to break through whatever personal failings were holding him back from achieving the skills of the ancients-
"Good luck with that," Ambrose sighs.
-or failing that, to find ways to work around his shortcomings.
The Trollblood Elixir is the result of one of those attempts. The healer was not powerful enough to cast the Spell of Regeneration that is the basis of the bilious brew, or at least not the "battlefield" version that you mastered relatively recently - he had to rely on an extended ritual that took hours and considerable assistance to complete and consumed a quantity of valuable reagents besides, all factors that greatly limited the number of people who could be granted such aid. The Elixir did not really address the matter of cost or effort, but its actual USE was much more convenient, as it did not require any further input from the physician or his followers to do its job.
Such a quality was particularly desirable for those "patients" who the Olympian sun god would not have deigned deserving of his assistance, and once word of the Elixir's existence got around, individuals and organizations of that very nature began trying to secure a supply of the potent potion for themselves. Some paid a fair price, while others resorted to intimidation and theft - the bottle before you falls into the latter category, having been stolen from the healer's sanctuary by an unnamed thief. Exactly what happened to it after that is unclear, save that it ultimately ended up in the hands of-!
"Oh, hey," Shadow Alex says, breaking off from his narrative tone. "This belonged to Hong."
"What, really?" you ask in surprise. "And he didn't use- well, no, if it really is as nasty as Ambrose said, I suppose he COULDN'T have used it without leaving himself wide open to the Quincy, could he?"
"It would have required him finding a VERY good hiding place or strong defence, or else quitting the battlefield altogether," the wizard replies. "Given what we know of the man and his ego, I doubt he would have considered a tactical withdrawal, even if it would have given him the chance to heal up and come back for another go, and since that was his first-and-last encounter with the Quincy, he likely would have had trouble hiding himself from their spiritual awareness even if he did deign to consider the notion. That leaves shields and barriers, which... no, given his focus on prismatic effects, he might have been able to pull something off, there. The Wandenreich may have simply overwhelmed him before his survival instincts could override his arrogance."
Always a possibility.
Your ability to cast the Spell of Regeneration with nothing but a moderate expenditure of mana and about fifteen seconds' effort makes this particular potion less useful to you than it would be to most other people, but that doesn't mean you can't get something out of the Trollblood Elixir. While it doesn't perfectly reproduce the effects of true regeneration, the Elixir's existence does suggest that making such a potent potion might be possible, and if that's the case, figuring out how to brew the lesser brand would be a natural first step towards figuring out the real deal.
Gained Trollblood Elixir
The almost glowing pink potion with the dead bugs floating in it is the next one to enter the circle.
The Swarmform Elixir turns out to be the work of a witch who had a truly disturbing fascination with insects, arachnids, and other creepy-crawlies. She wasn't just the sort of person who kept bugs as pets - although she did do that - or had that sort of earnest enthusiasm for a particular topic which alternately bemuses, irritates, or unsettles people who don't share the interest - though again, she often did act that way - she was a full-fledged entomophile. Chitinous creatures that would make a regular person's skin crawl and send entomophobes running away screaming drew her in as surely as a fly to honey, and magic that allowed one to communicate with, conjure, and command the innumerable insectoids of the world held an equal appeal.
The witch's ultimate goal was to one day transcend her "fleshy cocoon" and join the insect kingdom-
"Why?" Ambrose wonders in bafflement.
-and to that end, much of her studies involved Transformation Magic. The Swarmform Elixir was something she concocted out of dissatisfaction with her existing shape-changing abilities, which could only give her the forms of supernaturally large vermin, and then only in the singular. She refused to be so limited, but she was not yet powerful enough to achieve permanent or even particularly long-lasting changes of form via spellcasting, and so the witch turned to rituals and potions.
You're half-expecting to hear that the Wandenreich tried to remove this woman because of the sheer creepy factor involved, but the story goes on to say otherwise - she was "the weird friend" of the sister of one of their Earthbound Echt-recruits, who got permission from his superiors to make the witch aware of the existence of Hell butterflies and ask her to determine whether or not it was possible to sabotage or co-opt them. The Soldat used different language, of course, talking of "freeing" the black-winged insects from the death gods that had "enslaved" them and perhaps "striking back" in the process.
Given Soul Society is still using Hell butterflies most of a century later, you think you can safely say that nothing came of that line of inquiry.
In any case, the Swarmform Elixir was not a token of battle but given as a gift, by a girl who didn't really understand why anyone WOULDN'T want to turn into a swarm of angry wasps for an hour or so.
"Dear gods, do you think she might have been trying to court him?" Ambrose wonders.
"Let's hope she didn't take after the female mantis," Balthazar notes. "Or a lot of female spiders."
You honestly aren't sure what to do with this potion.
Shapeshifting magic is something you've used in the past, but only as a one-to-one change of form; turning into multiple creatures of any sort is not an ability you've pursued, though you could probably pull something off with the correct ritual. Maybe. From that perspective, an Elixir that gives you quick access to an ability you'd otherwise need several minutes' effort to pull off is worth taking.
Against that, there is the whole bug issue. Unlike the witch who created this potion, you've never felt any particular urge to become a swarm of wasps, nor can you think of a situation you've run into where doing so would have been a better approach than what you actually did at the time - and you CAN think of a few instances in which becoming a mass of insects would have been to your distinct disadvantage, like that time you cleared out the nest of Gohma in the Memorian Outpost.
"Insect" versus "giant spider" is a type-disadvantage if ever there was one.
In the end, you decide to leave the Swarmform Elixir for now and come back to it later.
Poking through your share of the potions a bit further, you find one other vial that might be a valid target for the Spell of Literary Vision. Made of a grey-tinted glass and with a stopper that has been blown into the shape of a tiny skull - about the size of the end of your thumb - the bottle contains a substance that is probably white in color (accounting for the hue of the container) and otherwise reminds you of various liquid soaps and similar gels you've run into. Probably not something meant to be drunk, although it might still be edible...
Not that you would try, because the aura of Necromantic Magic emanating from the thing falls under the wavelength of curses.
"Why wasn't this in the room with the nasty stuff, Ambrose?" you ask, pointing at the bottle.
"Because the 'curse' in question is relatively harmless and even potentially beneficial," the wizard replies. "What we have here is an Oil of Eternal Rest. Apply it to any living creature and it's completely harmless, if unpleasantly cool and slimy. Apply it to a dead body, however, and that corpse becomes resistant to magic meant to communicate with it, raise it as one of the undead, or return it to life."
Urahara makes a sound of interest at that. "Only resistant?"
"It does depend on the relative power of the curse-caller and the would-be necromancer."
That also explains why it's a curse. Most benign magical effects usually have limited duration, whereas a curse that isn't broken can last indefinitely - certainly long enough for a body to decay past the point of usefulness for most endeavors. Granted, the Spell of Resurrection would still have a shot even if the body had been reduced to (cursed) dust, and True Resurrection could work even without that... but you probably shouldn't mention those spells when there's a Shinigami in the room, exile or not.
"Does this stuff work against unraised corpse-demons?" you ask.
"That can get tricky, due to the demonic element," Balthazar says frankly. "The Spell of Rest Eternal CAN keep a vampire's victim from reanimating, if it's applied to the body quickly enough, and even when it doesn't stop the demon from taking over the corpse, it can have a range of effects. The most extreme outcome is the corpse remaining in a state of torpor with the vampiric essence trapped inside, unable to sense its surroundings or move unless or until the curse is broken. In less severe cases, you'll get a vampire spawn with some degree of physical disability - partial paralysis; impaired vision, hearing, or touch; that sort of thing - which may or may not lessen over time as it feeds and grows stronger. And then there are the ones that wake up feeling numb for a while, and otherwise don't notice a problem."
That's a surprisingly thorough breakdown.
"I met an Italian witch three centuries back who researched the topic extensively and was perfectly happy to share her notes on the subject," is the Merlinean Master's explanation. "Nice lady. Hated vampires."
"...do you think this could be her work?" you ask.
"It doesn't feel like it," Balthazar says, glancing at the bottle of oil. "Then again, that WAS three hundred years ago, give or take a few decades..."
Speaking of bottles with skulls attached, there's that flask of what you're assuming was poison-
"It is," Ambrose says. "Specifically, it's a type of snake venom that's been magically altered to be faster acting, harder to resist, and more difficult to identify."
-to decide what to do with. Magical though it is, it doesn't feel potent enough to trigger any visions, literary or otherwise. You also don't have any particular use for or interest in poisons.
What will you do with it?
After that are a few potions meant to temporarily enhance various traits and abilities. Each grants a major boost to one particular skill and lasts for about an hour; looking at the selection, you wonder if some or all of them weren't previously the property of La Renarde.
Shadow Alex picks up the little bottle and peers into it intently, before nodding and placing it in the circle of statuettes.
"What was that about?" you ask.
"Just making sure there weren't any dead things floating in this one," he replies. "You know, besides the usual."
...after the Swarmform Elixir, you suppose that is a fair concern, especially with a Necromantic potion. Most potions ARE made from "dead things," of course, but most aren't quite as in-your-face about it as that one.
The Spell of Literary Vision is cast once again, and your passing thought that the Oil of Eternal Rest might have been the work of the witch that Balthazar met is proven incorrect. Instead, it was created by a druid who resided in France before, during, and after the First World War, and who was one of several magical experts contacted by the post-war French government for advice and assistance in cleaning up battlefields that had either seen magic used or been the site of such death and devastation that supernatural phenomena came about as a result. Among their other tasks, that team of specialists had to deal with necromancers of various species who planned to go poking into the trenches and mass graves-
"Are we going to hear more about that guy who had the Darkskull?" Shadow Briar wonders.
"Hush, and let me read," her partner replies.
-looking for fresh corpses to harvest or reanimate and interesting new undead and atrocities to study. A bare handful of these students of the oft-considered least pleasant school of magic had the decency to seek permission and offer compensation before they went digging up the dead of the Great War, but most couldn't be bothered.
The Oil of Eternal Rest was concocted as part of a plan to put a stop to any ambitious idiot's attempt to raise an army of the dead. There were far too many bodies for individual application to have been possible, even if enough of the Oil could be brewed in the time available - which it couldn't - but the druid and his associates had managed to come up with a ritual that could apply the Oil's effects to all the dead bodies within a large area in one go, and which would use flasks of the stuff as material components.
This wasn't a perfect solution: some bodies were buried deeply enough to be "protected" from the spell; others on or beyond the edge of one casting's area of effect might be similarly shielded by the terrain; and of course, a necromancer could always try to break the curse on a corpse that had caught his eye, or even just overpower it if he was skilled enough. Still, it was something.
This bottle of Oil was part of a batch of a dozen bottles that never made it to their intended destination, as the courier entrusted with their delivery was ambushed by agents of one of the necromancers, who'd worked out enough of what was being done to thwart his "unprecedented research opportunity" to start targeting his opposition's logistics. The courier and his cargo were brought to a lab for examination, and that lab was subsequently attacked by the Wandenreich as part of THEIR post-War activities in Europe. The unfortunate deliveryman was already dead by that point, and the Quincy gathered up the vials of Oil thinking them to be the necromancer's work.
Your reading of this sample of the Oil offers you only limited information about what happened to the other eleven bottles that were with it. Several were shattered during their violent retrieval, and one that was "merely" cracked i the process was taken away for examination and disposal shortly after their arrival in Silbern; a fifth flask was removed not too long after that, most likely to provide an uncontaminated sample for comparative purposes. Several more bottles were used up for entirely unknown reasons over the course of a few months, and the remainder were expended over a decade after that, purpose once again unclear.
Gained Oil of Eternal Rest
This "Ritual of Rest Eternal" has caught your attention, and you ask the other spellcasters in the room if they've ever heard of it before.
"Not this ritual specifically, no," Ambrose replies. "It's never been a secret that there were official unofficial efforts to clean up the supernatural fallout of the Great War, even if it's not much talked about anymore, but the details of any given attempt were never widely known. Part of that was just the people involved keeping secrets for the sake of having secrets, something magic-users and governments alike are equally prone to, but there were also good reasons to practice information security; the more well-known a ritual becomes, the easier it is for others to disrupt, and there were enough unfriendly individuals trying to do that already without anybody giving them a leg up on the process. That same enemy action would have caused some information loss as well, much like what happened with the Oil."
"Aside from all of that, people may legitimately not have wanted to talk about what they saw and did," Balthazar adds. "Even if they were trying to FIX the horrible things instead of causing or exploiting them, they still would have seen some nasty stuff."
Fair point.
"Alright," you say then, "but speaking as experts in the arcane, and assuming for a moment that this ritual could be acquired or an equivalent developed, do you think it would be possible to use it to mess with corpse-demons on the Hellmouth? Or in other places where the unholy undead are a persistent issue?"
"It likely wouldn't work on the Hellmouth," Ambrose says with a shake of his head. "The Oil of Eternal Rest replicates the effects of the Spell of Rest Eternal, and one of the key material components for that spell is a small quantity of holy water - or unholy water, depending on your available sources and personal beliefs - and the ambient levels of corruption, Chaos, and Evil would counteract the former and twist the latter. If you applied the spell or the Oil directly to a single corpse, it should still be concentrated enough to work even in those conditions, though maybe not for as long as intended - and possibly not without side-effects if you used the unholy water version - but any attempt to spread the effect out over a large area would run right into all that demonic energy."
"Most areas not so heavily tainted should see at least some benefit," Balthazar continues, "though it would depend on what exactly was causing the reanimations. A normal graveyard in an otherwise normal town that just happens to have a nest of vampires dwelling in it would get the normal effects for every corpse in the ground at the time the ritual was performed, and I'd give it good odds of doing SOMETHING to any corpse-demon caught in the area of effect - though maybe not great odds of said something being particularly impressive."
"Ounces of prevention versus pounds of cure," Ambrose agrees. "Easier to keep the damned things from waking up in the first place than to take them out after the fact."
"I don't know about THAT," Shadow Alex muses. "Considering how flammable your average blood-rat is, digging up a grave to get at a newbie seems like a lot more effort to go to than just frying them."
"Except for the part where you actually know where to find the unrisen," Ambrose counters, "and can calculate when they'll be waking up with a pretty high degree of accuracy just from an obituary report. Anything else, you have to hunt for."
"True," your Dark Self sighs. "And Dad asked us not to set fire to the tunnels..."
"What's this about fire in tunnels?" Urahara asks curiously.
You explain about the Spell to Burn Corruption, and how you'd considered using it to clean out Sunnydale's extensive "Underworld" of demon-infested storm sewers, maintenance tunnels, interconnected basements, and dug-out lairs, after your Shadow brought the subject up.
"The whole TOWN is like that?" the Shinigami asks, visibly taken aback.
"Not the WHOLE thing, no," you admit. "My family basement doesn't have any underground access, and neither do any of my friends' houses or any of our relatives'. Lu-sensei's dojo is the same, and I made a point of checking my school to be sure it was clear, too."
"But a statistically significant portion of the area is still accessible underground?" Urahara asks, seeking clarification.
"Say what you will about Richard Wilkins, the man thinks of ALL of his constituents," Ambrose says, shaking his head again.
"Whatever it is you're planning to do with that, lad, remember to be careful when handling it," Ambrose advises, as you take the bottle of poison. "Venom isn't dangerous to touch, but if you've got a pre-existing wound or cut yourself in the process of working with it, you're likely in for a bad time, especially with this stuff. That is, unless you've learned the Spell to Neutralize Poison?"
"Not yet, no," you admit. "I'll be careful, and Briar will remind me."
"Darn right!"
"Do you happen to know what spell was used to augment the poison?" you ask then.
The wizard is fairly sure that he does, though he notes that three separate spells were employed to formulate this toxin. Two of these are already known to you, thanks to past-life instruction from Koume and Kotake: the Spell to Obscure Poison is what makes this venom's effects more difficult to detect; and the Spell of Pernicious Poison is what makes it harder to resist. The third enhancement, the Spell of Accelerated Poison, is not one you've studied, but is a second-circle spell available to druids, wizards, and sorcerers, so if you wanted to look into learning it, you wouldn't have too hard a time.
As a small bonus, there is enough of the clear liquid in the bottle to account for several doses of the magically enhanced venom, so if you wanted to CAREFULLY experiment with some of it, you could.
You still aren't sure what you're actually going to do with this stuff, but having the option TO do anything with it is better than not, right?
...right?
Gained Enhanced Snake Venom
Though most of these potions have effects that you could easily replicate via spells - potentially to a superior level, depending on which potions and which spells you're talking about - and none of them offer truly ground-breaking abilities, there is something to be said for being able to quickly apply a supernatural edge to one's existing skills without having to expend any of your current reserves on the task. That goes double for your friends and allies, most of whom can't simply whip out a spell to get this sort of boost and could benefit considerably if you, Amy, or Mrs. Madison were to supply them with a few handy draughts.
The Elixir of Hiding is particularly noteworthy, seeing as how avoiding serious trouble - particularly in Sunnydale - is going to be the best way for most of your peers to deal with real threats for several more years. Being half-sized compared to ordinary adults makes trying to fight them a whole lot harder, to say nothing of the issues with taking on supernaturally enhanced adults. You would really rather not have your friends trying to emulate a certain heroic brat in green any more than they absolutely must...
Anyway, the fact that you have two doses of that one gives you greater odds of figuring out what was put into it, should you decide to break it down for analysis.
Gained Skill Potions
Moving on from the limited selection of potions, you see almost a dozen coils of rope placed together on a table, radiating faint Augmentation and Transformation Magic.
"We have here a few classic Ropes of Climbing," Ambrose says, gesturing grandly at two-thirds of the ropes, which are piled slightly apart from the others. Mainly for Urahara's benefit, he adds, "Capable of supporting up to three thousand pounds securely, able to independently scale any horizontal or vertical surface up to their maximum length under their own power, and likewise able to tie, knot, untie, and/or unknot themselves as needed. Despite the similarities, no three came from the same source."
"No three?" you venture.
"Two of them were in La Renarde's kit; evidently she was a lady who believed in being prepared."
"Not the most useful thing for high-level Quincy in sufficiently spirit-dense environments," Urahara says, "but I can see how they'd be a help to people who couldn't get airborne under their own power."
"These, on the other hand," the wizard continues, gesturing to the next four coils, which give off a faint hint of Abjuration in addition to the aura of Augmentation and Transformation, "are Ropes of Binding. They're meant to secure things rather than scale them, whether said things are unstable loads, prisoners, or a group of animals that might wander off."
"Isn't that kind of all the same thing, from a certain point of view?" Shadow Briar wonders.
"There are curious similarities, aren't there?" Ambrose remarks. "Anyway, the animating magic on these doesn't allow them to climb walls; instead, they can tie up just about anything you'd care to name, within the limits of their size, and use a much larger and more complex range of knots to do it."
Useful for that role, then.
"This curious thing is a Rope of Mending," Balthazar takes over, gesturing to a length of rope that seems a bit shorter than the others, and is limited to an aura of pure Transformation Magic. "Unlike the others, it can't animate itself; instead, it's enchanted so that if you cut a piece of it off, put it to whatever use you need it for, and then come back and touch the severed ends together, the pieces will reattach. The main rope and any separated pieces can also repair themselves from other forms of damage over time, but they won't 'regrow' any bits that have actually been cut off or outright destroyed - and if they aren't somehow reattached, you end up with a shorter rope. This one was also La Renarde's, and from the look of things, she'd lost a few pieces over the time she had it."
You wonder how. It's too bad that none of these Ropes feel like they could support a Vision.
You have numerous methods at your disposal for bypassing walls, cliffs, and other such obstacles, ranging from spells that grant enhanced climbing ability or the power of levitation to transformations and teleportation to magic that reshapes or simply destroys whatever is in your way.
You are, bluntly, not hurting for options in this area.
That said, one thing that all those spells have in common is that it costs mana and/or time to cast them, while the ones that produce a lasting effect on you personally clutter up your aura. A situation may yet arise where you don't have the time, money, or mystical space to spare for such methods, in which case it would behoove you to have an alternative for scaling barriers on hand.
Ropes of Climbing are just such an alternative, and evidently a fairly popular one, so why not take a couple coils of the stuff?
Besides, this way, you keep more of La Renarde's stuff.
Gained La Renarde's Ropes of Climbing
Looting Silbern was a profitable venture on multiple levels. Quite aside from all the loot your summoned allies helped you make off with, you also learned a few things about the procedure of plundering a place, ranging from what sort of goods to grab to Captain Zaraki's advice about not stopping to read any papers until the sack was complete.
At the moment, looking at these Ropes of Binding, you're particularly reminded of how the Boulder Brothers and your other elemental looters took to using rugs, bedsheets, and wall hangings as makeshift sacks and ties to keep the piles of plunder they were carting about from spilling all over the place. While you aren't complaining about the cleverness and/or experience of your allies - you summoned professional plunderers for a reason, after all - you can't help but think that you might have saved them some time and earned yourself a bigger payday if you'd been able to provide them with proper bags and ropes.
It's definitely something to consider for future raids, because you expect it'll be quite some time before you get another chance to invade and pillage any place so grand as the Quincy stronghold, and most lesser locations simply aren't going to have such an abundance of large pieces of strong fabric capable of serving as makeshift means of storing and transporting your ill-gotten hard-earned newfound wealth. Bags of Holding would be ideal for such a task, but Ropes of Binding aren't without their value - and the latter, at least, are right before your eyes.
Gained Ropes of Binding (x4)
Oh, and the Ropes could also be useful for tying up prisoners, assuming you ever take any that couldn't rip, tear, or burn their way through a magically reinforced length of rope, or simply phase or shapeshift their way to freedom.
There is something to be said for having the option to not have to use up and leave behind sixty feet of magical rope just to restrain a single person. Quite aside from that, the chance to study a magical item capable of self-repair is one you aren't about to pass up.
Gained La Renarde's Rope of Mending
It's probably your thoughts on future uses of the Ropes of Binding that have you looking for bags next. You don't find any spatially expanded pouches, which is understandable; the Wandenreich probably issued any that they acquired to some of their troops as soon as they realized what the things were. That said, there are some larger Bags of Holding, the sort of big sacks that are used for travel, storage, and of course, robbing a place blind, but typically aren't carried into combat.
You have to ask if any of your summoned minions realized what they'd found.
"At least one of them did," Ambrose assures you. "We found several of the Bags in your pile loaded up with goodies, generally of the more fragile persuasion."
"Probably not the Boulder Brothers, then," Shadow Briar notes.
Yeah, most of them struck you as either too rambunctious or too hard-headed to have considered something like this. The boss might have thought of it, but he was outnumbered four to one.
Anyway, the enchantment upon the Bags is potent enough that only the smallest of them aren't likely to prove a stable Literary Vision.
Sitting next to the magical sacks is an enchanted quiver.
"Rather ironic to find something like this in a Quincy base," Ambrose notes. "The Efficient Quiver was created for archers who had to worry about physical ammunition, both in the sense of carrying it and potentially running out of it at a bad time. It's essentially three Bags of Holding sewn together, with certain limits on what can fit inside each section."
Like the Bags, it's also potent enough that you could get a Literary Vision off of it.
It takes a while to work through the Literary Visions for all six Bags of Holding, and in the process, you discover that some of them belonged to the same owner(s).
The largest of the Bags and one of the second-largest pair are both designed in the "traditional" style for their sort, being pale brown gunny sacks about four feet long and two feet across at the widest point, which you'd expect to see someone hauling over one shoulder, bag bulging at the seams with its owner's luggage or loot. Yet the fabric used in these isn't common tow, being much too soft and smooth against the skin, and though they're empty, the Bags are unnaturally heavy, weighing ten or twenty times what they really ought to.
"Why is that, anyway?" Shadow Briar wonders.
"It's not so much 'weight' as it is 'drag'," Balthazar replies. "When you create an extra-dimensional space, you're bending the surrounding space-time to open up an empty pocket that's typically only attached to the surrounding environment through one access point. If you make that point fixed in relation to the rest of the planet, you can account for local gravitational, spatio-temporal, magical, and other phenomenon when you set the thing up and largely not have to worry about it afterwards. I'm sure you've noticed a lack of stability issues with all those Magnificent Mansions you like to set up," he adds, glancing your way.
You have used quite a few of those, haven't you? Particularly in situations where Balthazar got a chance to see them. And yes, once you got the hang of, well, "hanging" them in mid-air, you've never had a problem with the things.
"When you try making the opening more mobile like this, however, you have to reinforce it against a much broader range of potential conditions that can change to an extreme degree at a moment's notice, while also compensating for the possibility of your little bubble of isolated space-time bumping into somebody else's extra-dimensional space," the Sorcerer of the Seven-Hundred and Seventy-Seventh Degree goes on, turning back to the false fairy. "In the process of that reinforcement, the edge of the pocket becomes more defined, more rigid, and harder to slip through the surrounding space-time - and since you have to prepare against the Bag's maximum potential load, it always encounters that amount of resistance when you try to move it, whether it's completely full or completely empty."
"...huh."
"Wait," Briar says then, "if that's the case, then why doesn't Alex's dimensional pocket... I don't know, make his pants feel like they weigh twenty pounds or something?"
"My clothes actually DO feel heavier when I'm using that spell," you admit, "but it's only by like, three pounds or so. That's partly because of how much smaller an Arcane Pocket is compared to most Bags of Holding and how much less resistance it encounters as a result, but it's also because it's MY spell, and fed by my power instead of having to rely on whatever a simple item can provide. Plus, the resistance isn't just 'pulling down' like normal weight, it's exerting that force against me from every direction, all over my body. When it's spread out that much, the pressure's hardly noticeable unless I'm already carrying a huge amount of stuff."
"...huh," Briar echoes her Shadow.
Anyway, getting back to the Literary Vision, the biggest Bag and its slightly smaller counterpart both belonged to a demon who'd been torn between upholding the nomadic traditions of his ancestors and indulging in the many material luxuries that Earth had to offer which his people's Hell-dimension of origin had not. When he had the good fortune to cross paths with a sorcerer who made use of a Bag of Holding to carry his own supplies, the demon was entranced, for here was the solution to his conundrum! With his own magic sack, he could carry far more than the mere essentials and minor trinkets that the rest of his kind customarily limited themselves to - he could carry the wealth of the entire tribe as easily as he would his own modest possessions! And with multiple Bags and animals to haul them, he could be rich beyond the dreams of the wealthiest chieftains of legend!
Many a demon would have killed the sorcerer then and there and taken his Bag of Holding, but this "G'hren" was insightful enough to realize that a living sorcerer might be able to make additional magic sacks for him, or at least tell him where and how they might be found - and G'hren knew his own greed, and that one Bag of Holding would not be enough to sate it, not unless it could hold an entire world.
The sorcerer was twice fortunate: he lacked the skills required to make most magic items, making it pointless for G'hren to abduct him; and he had acquired his Bag of Holding just recently, from an arcane craftsman who lived less than an hour away and had still had half a dozen such satchels in stock when his latest customer departed.
Truly stunned by the idea of the riches he might carry with so many such Bags in his possession, a dazed G'hren asked for directions and staggered off, leaving the sorcerer unharmed. He made up for this by robbing the bagmaker's shop of every magic bag, and then filling those with the REST of the shop's contents before departing into the night...
Following his acquisition of the Bags of Holding, G'hren devoted himself to filling the stolen sacks with ever more ill-gotten gains, and to seeking more of the magical containers whenever he could. Initially, a large portion of what he took was food and drink, as great stores of such were a form of wealth that his people had never been able to enjoy, but this only lasted until G'hren discovered - to his considerable dismay - that typical Bags of Holding do not prevent decay, though they might slow it somewhat due to the lack of oxygen. After that, the demon focused more on non-perishable goods.
In villages and small towns, G'hren would hit the wealthiest-looking shop or residence and leave that same night, whereas in larger settlements, he might perform two or three such heists before moving on. He roamed across the Middle East, up through Eastern Europe, and then out into the Great Steppe over the course of a year, demonic constitution and supernatural speed allowing him to maintain a pace that humans and horses could not match. In this way, G'hren literally outran not only pursuit but also the rumors of his activities, allowing him to hit unsuspecting targets and be gone before word of his previous heists had caught up with him.
Towards the end of this period, as the Bags began to reach their limits, the demon lamented not having been able to take their creator as a captive - but alas, G'hren was operating on his own at the time and lacked the means to keep a prisoner secured and mobile. That wasn't even getting into the difficulties and potential dangers of keeping a man capable of creating magic items captive, much less making him work for his captor. He had, at least, not killed the bagmaker, merely rendered him unconscious and thereby left open the possibility of returning to make a more permanent working arrangement - or maybe just to pillage his shop again, once it had been suitably re-stocked.
Regardless, once he was as wealthy as his current means would allow, G'hren returned to his people to display his success, hear their accolades, and claim the position of authority within the tribe that was his due. Many of the nomads were rightly impressed by their fellow's fortune and cunning and the immense riches they'd allowed him to acquire, but others were disturbed by G'hren's naked greed - and some, like the chieftain and his loyal followers, simply did not care for how the upstart began throwing his weight (and the weight of his plunder) around in the tribe's politics. Eventually, G'hren pushed too far, and a challenge was issued to remind him of his place.
For all the loot he'd taken and the skills he'd honed to get it, G'hren was not the warrior that most of his elders were, and too many of his spoils were merely valuable, instead of items of power that he might have leveraged. Then again, even that might not have helped him, given what an encumbrance the Bags would have been, to say nothing of the difficulty in searching through them in the middle of combat. Regardless, the ambitious demon was defeated, his rising influence curtailed, and - due to an overconfident wager - one of his Bags lost, with all of its contents.
G'hren's greed and ambition could not abide this. Gathering his most ardent supporters, he ambushed and murdered his opponent, recovered his "stolen" property, and then fled the tribe and returned to Earth. Here, the demon sought out the bagmaker, this time meaning to take him prisoner and have him make enough Bags of Holding to outfit all of his followers as well as G'hren himself was, and to equip him with even more than that. Theirs would be a band where each warrior carried the wealth of a tribe, the arms of a champion, and the tools to match a wise man's power and visions! They would crush all challengers, take all spoils, win all glory - and he, as their leader, would be the greatest and wealthiest and most glorious of them all!
This triumphant vision hit a snag when the demons hit the mage-crafter's shop and found it largely empty, aside from the bagmaker himself, who sat at ease behind the counter with pipe and wine and invited the demons to join him. Wary and yet angry, G'hren stalked inside and demanded to know where the old human's new Bags were.
"'Too much of my wealth was tied up in my goods, O Thief,' the old man laughed," your Shadow reads off from his Book. "'It took me many years of work, on top of the investments of my sire and my teacher, to reach the level of prosperity you saw and destroyed on your previous visit. It would take many years more to recover from those losses, and I am too impoverished and too old to try.'"
"'Yet you retain your wits, and your hands are steady, despite your age and your drink,' the demon returned. 'You can yet work your magic to serve me.'"
"'I could, I surely could! And I can make more than just Bags of Holding! Tell me, He Who Would Be My Master, have you ever heard of the wonder that is the Portable Hole?'"
"Son of a bitch, he didn't," Ambrose mutters.
He did. Forewarned of G'hren's return by a sympathetic seer, the old craftsman had planned his revenge well, creating a lure that the greedy demon would be sure to take: a magical storage space comparable in size to the largest Bag of Holding, but with a negligible weight-
"Wait, how does that work?" the Briars ask.
"Most of the resistance that a Bag of Holding encounters from surrounding space-time comes about because it's technically in a constantly 'open' state," Balthazar explains. "You can reach into it anywhere and anytime you like, changing the orientation of the mouth and space beyond it as you like. A Portable Hole, on the other hand, is only open when you've set it against a solid surface - the floor, a tabletop, a wall, maybe a ceiling depending on local gravity and buoyancy - which makes it more like a typical 'immobile' extra-dimensional space. When the Hole is 'closed,' its attached pocket is effectively isolated from the rest of the continuum, which reduces their mutual interference to basically nothing."
"Why don't they just make the Bags that way?" Urahara asks.
"Portable Holes are harder to make and more expensive," Ambrose answers. "They're also trickier to get a specific item out of; a Bag of Holding doesn't automatically sort things for you - that takes a Handy Haversack - but you can reach anything inside it, whereas a typical Portable Hole is ten feet deep."
"...slightly awkward," the scientist admits. "So, what was it that the bagmaker wasn't supposed to do?"
Quite simply, he waved the Portable Hole in G'hren's face and the faces of his followers, got them arguing over who should be allowed to have it, and then told G'hren that it was safe to store in a Bag of Holding "for extra security" - which was, as any serious student of the arcane in general or space-time magic in particular would have known, a total lie.
G'hren was NOT a serious student of the arcane in general or space-time magic in particular, and the instant he tossed the Hole into one of his Bags, the interaction between their magics tore open an unstable gate to the Astral Plane-
"Wait, WHAT?" Urahara exclaims.
Has he never heard about that?
"Obviously not!"
-which sucked the unprepared demons into the timeless void. The bagmaker actually escaped this fate, having been far enough from the center of the event to escape the pull of the short-lived portal.
"And the last that G'hren ever saw or heard of the old man was his cruel, gleeful laughter, as he took vengeance upon the one that had wronged him," your Shadow reads.
G'hren did not long survive the rough trip to the Astral Plane, as several of his followers turned on him and those who remained loyal to him in a rage for what his leadership had brought them to - and then, with their leader's death, the battle degenerated into a free-for-all, every demon seeking to claim G'hren's remaining wealth for himself alone.
Unsurprisingly, this ended with all of them dead.
The bodies and G'hren's former possessions drifted for an uncertain length of time after that, and the fates of most are not revealed to you. The two Bags before you now were eventually noticed and claimed by a lich residing on a private demiplane-
Your interest sharpens.
-which was invaded by the Wandenreich some decades later. The Bags, long since emptied of their original contents, were found and claimed by a member of that force, who did the proper thing and used them to loot as much of the undead archmage's treasure as he could.
Since the Bags weren't convenient to carry, they ended up in a storage room after that, occasionally getting pulled out to help with various large moving jobs before going back to the closet.
Gained G'hren's Bags of Holding
The other Bags of Holding that turn out to have a common history are the two smaller ones, whose identical size makes them even more of a proper pair than the mismatched Bags that once belonged to G'hren.
These sacks were the property of a merchant who made his living by traveling the planes, buying or trading for the wares of one realm in order to sell or trade them away in another. This particular wandering salesman was a genie, specifically of the race known as the jann. Though his people are a far cry from the wish-granting genies of popular legend, they do possess some fairly potent inherent magical abilities, chief among them the ability to travel between and survive upon the Elemental Planes, as well as the more tolerable Material and Astral Planes. This power is just as random as the Spell of Plane Shifting, however, and a janni's nature as a being of all four of the physical elements means that they cannot remain on any given Elemental Plane as long as their more strongly and specifically attuned cousins, having to leave within a matter of days to avoid harm.
As a consequence, the tale within the Shadow Book makes passing reference to trades conducted in dozens of chance meetings across the Planes of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, upon the Earth, and even within the proverbial emptiness of the Astral - though far more often, Jawad's trips to that plane were simply him passing through in search of portals to other realms. The story also mentions that, at a certain point in his travels, the janni became practiced enough with his inherent plane-shifting power to more precisely control where it would deposit him; while it still lacked the pinpoint accuracy possible with a Gate Spell, ending up a couple of hours' or days' walk from his intended destination was nonetheless far preferable to winding up weeks off-course.
It was this comparatively fine control which allowed Jawad to really come into his own as a planar merchant, enabling him to cut out hundreds or even thousands of miles of overland travel on a single plane by shifting to an adjacent realm and then back again. Instead of a vagabond who showed up unexpectedly with random baubles and then disappeared afterwards, the janni became a familiar sight in various communities, earning greater welcome and building up a small but loyal client base over time as he proved himself and his wares to be reliable.
The money earned from this breakthrough was what paid for the two Bags of Holding now sitting in the circle of Goddess statues.
Once he had even a single Bag of Holding to his name, Jawad's business began to expand rapidly. The ability to carry hundreds of pounds' worth of goods at a time for a fraction of the weight and space paid for itself within in a matter of weeks, and after a few months, the janni merchant was able to acquire a second magical sack. Then he purchased some animals to carry this and even greater loads for him, picked up a bit of property and turned it into an actual store staffed by local hirelings, and then recruited some of his kinsmen.
It is worth noting at this point - and the story does so - that the jann are well-known as a proud, private, and easily offended people, a quality that arises from their being the least powerful of genie-kind and the most human in appearance. The former trait has earned the jann the pity, scorn, and condescension of their mightier cousins for millennia, while the tendency of non-genies to mistake the planar wanderers for mere humans pricks at that wounded pride. Jawad was a distinct outlier among his kind for being so willing to socialize and deal with outsiders, and few if any of the other jann that he approached shared that nature.
By now a seasoned merchant, Jawad knew better than to try selling people things that they would never buy. Thus, instead of trying to turn other jann into merchants, he hired them as caravaners, whose task would be to keep the goods moving between his planar shops and storehouses. The actual buying and selling part of the business would be handled by those who worked at these locations, if not by Jawad himself, allowing the jann to profit without having to direct interact with those they did not trust.
After a few years of such expansion, the onetime vagabond had interests in scores of markets across a dozen planes. Jawad's curiously outgoing nature combined with the jann reputation for neutrality saw him doing business with beings from all over the planes: be they mortal or immortal, celestial or infernal or Other, so long as they came to trade and heeded the laws of hospitality while within Jawad's walls, all were welcome; and so long as they continued to offer those goods and hospitality, and did not threaten the bottom line of the far greater merchant houses or offend the ruling powers, Jawad and his people were welcome in turn - but not everywhere.
Jawad's willingness to deal with and hire beings from the far ends of the multiverse earned him and his employees their share of suspicion from the more polarized, provincial, or paranoid corners of Creation. Though he did his best to make sure that each of his planar outlets was staffed by natives of the realm in question, sometimes it was unavoidable that an off-world worker would have to be assigned, even in a temporary capacity - and of course, there were the constant comings and goings of other foreign entities to unsettle the locals. Suspicion, protests, and obstruction were not uncommon, especially when a new store was being established; violence was rarer, but did happen, especially on harsher worlds.
When the first World War broke out on Earth, Jawad was caught off-guard, never having considered that a largely non-magical conflict could unleash such death and destruction. After losing two stores, most of the workers and goods they'd held, and a great number of valuable customers, the janni merchant ordered his remaining holdings in or near the conflict areas evacuated and abandoned. His business would not return to these regions until several years after the war's ending, at which time Jawad visited Earth to personally oversee the construction and grand opening of a new shop; this was intended as a sign of his confidence in his workers and the recovering market, but it would backfire.
The local Wandenreich branch learned of the strange creatures working on the building, and their commander - who had been "on the ground" for much of the Great War, and perhaps suffered lingering trauma from the things he witnessed - ordered an unprovoked attack on the construction site. Jawad was wounded in the opening moments of the attack and forced to flee, taking as many of his people with him as he could but leaving some of his possessions behind, including his original Bags of Holding, which he'd always made a point of using on personal trips, if only out of nostalgia.
The Spell of Literary Vision doesn't state if the janni merchant died of his injuries, but it does mention that his businesses on Earth closed their doors in the years after that attack.
Gained Jawad's Bags of Holding
Shadow Alex's next casting of the Spell of Literary Vision reveals the last of the Bags of Holding - the second of the next-to-largest variety - to have been the property of an actual Quincy, and a full-fledged member of the Wandenreich at that.
Born in the Seventeenth Century and raised within the hidden demiplane, Bertrand Wendell was not especially remarkable for his skills or power, though he was a fully trained and well-experienced Soldat. The thing about him that stood out was his fascination with the foreign cultures to be found on Earth, an interest sparked in childhood from listening to stories told by his great-great-great-grandfather, Marwin - one of the last remaining survivors of the Lichtreich outside of the ranks of the Sternritter and the other elites within the Hidden Empire.
That ancient man, then over half a millennium old, had traveled all over Europe and the near parts of Africa and Asia in the years when Yhwach still ruled his people, and had subsequently revisited many of those lands during his time of service to the Wandenreich. By the time his descendant was born, Marwin had long been retired from such frontline duties, his spiritual strength insufficient to hold off the passage of time and keep him in full fighting strength. Passing down the wisdom and folly of the past has ever been a favored diversion of old men with time on their hands and young ears to heed them, and young Bertrand's ancestor never missed an opportunity to do so.
There were only so many ways that one who had only ever known the long, monolithic existence of life in Silbern could react to the idea that individual humans and even nations might only live for a span of decades, that they could take on so many different forms, and that they grew and changed and diminished so rapidly even within their own brief lifetimes. Where most of the Quincy isolationists regarded other humans with pity or contempt for this and other shortcomings, Bertrand instead became incredibly curious about them - all the more so when Grandfather Marwin passed and left him this Bag of Holding, which he had acquired and used on his travels in the years before the Gates of the Sun existed, and then decades later, when venturing into regions where the Hidden Empire could not openly reach.
Partly to indulge his personal interest and partly to honor his forebear, Bertrand requested to be assigned to the same territories that the old man had once patrolled. By then, some of the nations whose names he had been told no longer existed, their lands claimed by other powers or abandoned to who- or whatever happened to reside there; others continued to exist, but were so far removed from the stories that Bertrand couldn't help but wonder if his grandfather had gotten the details wrong in his old age, or if these places legitimately had changed so much; and then there were those regions for which it seemed as though Time had not advanced any more than it had for Silbern.
Although the "modern" Wandenreich had outposts spread halfway around the world, there were still some places where the infrastructure for quick and easy use of their portal network did not exist, which led to Bertrand taking his inherited Bag of Holding along - again, partly in emulation of his grandfather, and partly for the simple practicality of the thing.
In his travels, Bertrand was not only exposed to many different human cultures, but also to other supernatural being and their ways of life, including the far-flung Earthbound Quincy. He had many acquaintances and no few friends among his distant cousins, and so when the Shinigami descended to destroy them, he spoke out in favor of intervention.
Unlike Olga, who was permitted to leave Silbern and oppose the Soul Society openly because she was not a Quincy herself and would not betray the Wandenreich's secrets even by accident, Bertrand was confined to the fortress for the duration of the genocide. He never quite forgave his kinsmen for that, and when he resumed his wandering ways after the war, he took every excuse he could to spend more time on Earth. While this gave Bertrand enough time away from his fellows to keep their interactions civil, it also caused him to age rapidly by the standards the citizens of the Wandenreich had become used to.
Already considered strange and troublesome by his fellows, Bertrand became more and more isolated: he was separated from his own generation by his physical age, but lacked the shared experiences to truly fit in with his elders; those few of his Earthbound Quincy acquaintances who had escaped the Shinigami felt betrayed by his absence or that of the Wandenreich as a whole and would have nothing to do with him; and there was always that barrier, cultural as much as spiritual, that non-Quincy could not overcome.
And so Bertrand Wendell grew old and alone, living out the last years of his life on the road. Eventually, a day came when someone realized that it had been months since the wanderer had last reported in, and the possibility of his death or capture was eventually kicked up to the Grandmaster, who sent back orders for a squad with medical assistance to be dispatched to a town in India. Here, they found Bertrand in a coma, having overstrained his body and spirit putting down an incarnation of an Asura which had been released when some opportunistic idiots from the East India Company ignored the "ignorant superstitions" of the locals and desecrated a statue bedecked in gold and jewels.
Said "statue" woke up cranky, took the vandals' heads as recompense, and then seized the town as the first step in building itself a new empire, only to run into a wandering spirit archer and be dispersed into the ether, cursing Lord Shiva all the way.
"What IS an Asura, exactly?" you ask. "And why would one of them curse this Shiva guy?"
"Asuras are a class of divine, semi-divine, or demonic beings native to India," Urahara replies. "They're related to the Devas, who are effectively the 'good' Powers of the region - although it's more complicated than just 'Devas good, Asuras evil.'"
"In this context," Ambrose interjects, "'incarnation' would mean that it wasn't the ACTUAL god-like being, just something that was connected to and strongly emulating it," Ambrose interjects. "Maybe some ancient demigod spawn using a parent's name or a faithful devotee blessed and cursed with its appearance and powers..."
Gained Hindu Theology F
"As for Shiva the Destroyer," Balthazar adds, "he's part of the Hindu trinity of supreme beings known as the Trimurti, alongside Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver. Among many other aspects and acts in myth and history, Shiva is known for occasionally handing out boons to individuals who've done great penances and earned good karma, only for the recipients to then go on to abuse the gifts. Some of those boons involved making an individual difficult or even impossible to kill unless specific conditions were satisfied, and they could get pretty complex. In this case, I'd guess that this Asura was blessed to be invincible to arrows, or maybe to projectile weapons in general - but a Quincy's Heilig Pfeil isn't exactly a weapon, now is it?"
Not a PHYSICAL one, at any rate...
In any case, there was little that the Wandenreich team could do for their wayward kinsman, save to bring him back to Silbern for observation and long-term care. Despite their efforts, Bertrand never awoke from his coma, and passed away some months later. His possessions were handed over to his relatives, who were quite surprised when they opened the Bag of Holding and found out just how much stuff it actually contained, but eventually the sack ended up in storage with the other items of its kind.
Gained Wendells' Bag of Holding
Next up is the somewhat appropriate but also rather misplaced Efficient Quiver. As Shadow Alex sets it within the ring of ivory figurines, you reflect that you are looking forward to finding out just how this item, so useful to any sort of archer who relies on physical ammunition, ended up in a fortress of archers who have no need for such...
The Quiver turns out to be another item that did not originate on Earth, instead hailing from the Outer Plane of Elysium, the Realm of Beauty, Heroes, and Freedom. As the name suggests, it has ancient ties to the Olympian pantheon, and a wide swathe of the realm resembles something out of Greek mythology, with heroic individuals alternately arguing points of philosophy, competing in great games, or venturing into the wilderness to do battle with the monsters that lurk there, and subsequently composing works of art to memorialize their feats. Song and story, sculpture and painting, even tools of battle, as beautiful as they are functional, are produced in this manner - yet that is not where the Quiver came from.
Once away from the competitive poleis, Elysium grows wild enough to be mistaken for Faerie, hosting many dark or desolate places where dread beasts lurk. Unlike the Realm of the Fae, these creatures are never truly the masters of their supposed domains, instead being permitted to exist here by the greater Powers of the realm and the nature of the plane itself, so that the many champions and hunters who call it home will never have a shortage of worthy and deserving foes to test themselves against and earn glory by overcoming. And once again unlike Faerie, where horror and wonder often go hand-in-hand, even the worst of Elysium's monsters and their lairs retain a stark, savage beauty, the better to inspire the poets and painters who will later try to immortalize their struggles.
And yet, like Faerie, a curious people can be found living in the wild places of Elysium, elf-like in stature and features, tied to the forces of nature, and - at least in some cases - carried upon glittering, insect-like wings. Known as azatas, these are one of the races native to the plane, and they may be found in many forms, orders or races or perhaps phases of a transformative life cycle which ranged from near-mortal to almost-eldritch. One of these kinds are bralani, beings of wind and storm whose physical forms are almost-elven swordsmen and archers. Held to be some of the fiercest of their people, the bralani relish tests of skill as much as any other native of Elysium and will range far in search of chances to prove their marksmanship.
About forty years ago, one such spirit was hunting one of the beasts of the plane - specifically, a hydra - when he saw his quarry whisked away by magic. Where some of his close kin might have shrugged and considered the hunt over, this bralani instead took the disappearance of his chosen prey as a further level of challenge and resolved to meet and overcome it. Consulting with an ally, he learned that a human wizard had called the hydra to Earth, binding it to serve him as a combination of pet, bodyguard, and experimental subject.
Champions of freedom that they were, the azata were not pleased to learn that even a monster had been subjected to such enslavement, and the bralani set out to "chastise" the wizard and release the beast, whether by bringing it back to Elysium or by slaying it outright. Due to the limits on his own power and his consideration of this hunt as a personal test, however, it took the outsider some time to make the journey from his native realm to Earth, using natural portals to cross between several planes over the course of a few months - which turned into several years, due to the temporal differences of some of those places and the extended quests the traveling azata undertook along the way.
In any case, once he had arrived on Earth, the otherworldly archer began his hunt in earnest, using his innate powers of flight to ride winds and explore the unfamiliar planet. It took him many more months to find the wizard's last known location, and in the process, the bralani encountered the Quincy and challenged a number of them to archery contests. As the traveler saw no particular reason to hide his purpose from those he interacted with, news of his existence and the nature of his quarry gradually spread among the Quincy community.
The bralani was apparently quite surprised the first time he arrived in a new town and met a complete stranger that knew who he was and what he was doing.
"There are no telephones in Elysium," Balthazar says simply.
"Barbarians," your Shadow mutters.
Also, more than one young spirit-archer wanted to challenge this otherworldly being, for the pride of the Quincy would not stand a rival who used mundane arrows!
"Was he that good?" Urahara wonders. "Because I know you've seen how many arrows a skilled Quincy can get going when he really wants to."
"It seems to have been more a matter of range and accuracy, or accuracy AT range, that had them worked up," your Dark Self reports, re-reading the section in question. "Also, the bralani DID have a magical bow, so those 'mundane' arrows kind of... weren't."
"Did the Quincy not know that?" you ask.
"They didn't think to ask how magic bows interact with their ammunition," is the answer. "And the azata seems to have found it funnier not to tell them."
...
"...are we SURE these guys aren't actually Fae?" you say then, turning to the wizard and the other sorcerer in the room.
"There IS some debate about that," Ambrose admits. "But don't bring it up to members of either group unless you know them very well first."
"Touchy subject?"
"And how."