You consider the possibility of just leaving the Bashing Shield with its partnered armor, as their common ownership and history might be enough to let them pass as a "single" object for the purposes of targeting them with the Spell of Literary Vision. After a moment's thought, however, you shake your head and set about unlatching the Shield from its place on the plate mail's stand-supported arm.
While it's not impossible to combine targets like that, especially if you use the Mark Metamagic, it does run the risk of altering the results of the spell. If all the components of your "target" were created at the same time and used together continuously, it would be fine; the same if you were just working with a suit of armor, the many parts of which are meant to be worn together, but are occasionally replaced due to damage and wear.
Shields are a bit more distinct than that, though, even when not enchanted. Historically, not every warrior carried a shield, preferring to use their off-hand to hold the reins of a horse, help wield a greatsword or other heavy weapon, or do other things - fetching a healing potion when it was urgently needed mid-battle comes to mind. By the same token, not everyone who used a shield wore heavy armor like this, so they're not as wholly or inherently "part" of a suit of plate like this, as the breastplate, helm, or gauntlets might be.
...although, if the helm and gauntlets had been enchanted as proper magic items in their own right, issues could arise there, too.
The point is, if you were to cast Literary Vision on two objects with as much "separation" to weigh against their "connection" as a suit of armor and a shield, you'd likely only get the parts of their shared legend that both items were present for, and that could potentially cut out a lot of details that applied only to one of the individual components.
Since the Bashing Shield is the only one of the two that's still functional, you'd prefer to get its "complete" history. Whatever you learn about the Fortified Armor in the process will probably be enough for your purposes for the time being, and you can always perform the Spell of Literary Vision another time if you want a more in-depth take on the plate armor's tale.
You hand the Shield off to your Shadow, who gives it a look for a moment, running one hand over some of the dents and then making a fist to compare against them, before setting the thing down and making with the casting.
The Bashing Shield's original owner was a knight of the Fifteenth Century known as Sir Guillaume, called "the Sturdy" by some of his fellows. While not the largest man ever, he was solidly built, even stronger and heavier than he looked, and possessed of a patient, purposeful nature - all factors that contributed to his preferred approach to combat, which was to rely on armor, shield, and defensive weapon-work to turn aside or absorb an opponent's attacks, steadily wearing down their stamina and their patience until they made a mistake and left an opening. That would be his cue to strike, and the bashing enhancement imbued into the Shield is both a consequence of and an asset for making such attacks, as the knight could not count on whatever weakness his opponents revealed to be within easy reach of his main weapon - a warhammer, for preference, suitable for breaking limbs, concussing brains, or (thanks to the hook on the reverse side) catching a leg and toppling the opponent, leaving them open for a helm- and skull-piercing blow.
"Was there a warhammer in the weapons collection?" you ask, looking around.
"I did not see one," Ambrose replies. "Balthazar?"
"Not that I can recall. Urahara?"
"I saw a few maces, but nothing that said 'hammer'."
Hm.
The Sturdy Knight was not a dedicated demon-hunter or professional monster-slayer like some of the other chivalrously inclined individuals you've read about today, but he did have a few run-ins with such creatures. Given how many supernatural entities effectively come with armor built right in, Sir Guillaume's hammer continued to serve him well in its intended roles, particularly once it had splattered enough fiends' brains to start empowering itself. His armor and shield were a bit less successful, needing regular repair and replacement work - or just outright replacement - after fending off claws, fangs, and other bits backed by supernatural strength, but they kept the bulk of the knight's injuries limited to bruises and strains, which was good enough.
And again, once Sir Guillaume managed to find a magic-user willing to provide enchantments for hire, his gear started holding up its end of those infrequent supernatural combats much better. As nice as additional protection for himself was, it was the increased durability of enchanted gear that the knight really wanted, as it prevented him from having to get replacement parts for his armor or a whole new shield after every fight with a hellspawn.
That is, incidentally, why the Bashing Shield has no heraldry. Even with the considerable defensive power invested into it, Sir Guillaume evidently never quite got over the suspicion that the latest enemy would somehow damage his shield beyond repair.
Considering the state of the Shield when compared to its partnered armor, and how the latter damage would have translated to the body underneath, perhaps the good knight should have been more concerned about himself...
For the most part, Sir Guillaume's list of encounters with the supernatural was nothing too outrageous: a monster here; an overgrown beast there; the odd corpse-demon, that sort of thing. Then, while traveling along the Italian coast on his way to Rome, the knight happened to cross paths with a mortal medusa - and one of the more powerful members of the species, at that, who retained the petrifying gaze of her distant ancestor.
This encounter did not end well for the Sturdy Knight, though it also did not end so poorly as it could have - namely, with his petrified form reduced to a pile of rubble or worn away by exposure to the elements over the course of centuries. Instead, Sir Guillaume "merely" ended up stuck as a statue in an underground chamber for a couple of centuries, which was the time it took for the descendants of the local witch who'd originally recruited him to hunt down the medusa to gain the power to reverse his condition.
The woman in question had developed a spell that should have protected the recipient from petrification, though it obviously turned out to be less efficacious than she'd hoped. Due to the magic's limited duration, the witch had been required to accompany Sir Guillaume to the medusa's lair before providing her dubious protection, and having gone that far, she decided she might as well go all the way and join the hunt; thus, when the knight's defenses failed him, the medusa still had an enemy to worry about and couldn't take the time to ensure the petrified warrior would never recover.
Having won that fight-
"Sir Guillaume got a few hits in before he ended up as a rock," Shadow Alex notes. "That seems to have helped quite a bit."
-the witch gained a considerable amount of wealth, both from the medusa's ill-gotten gains and by selling or trading various materials harvested from the monster's corpse. She never forgot that her success had come at the cost of a good man's not-quite-death, however, and strove to protect Sir Guillaume's petrified body while seeking the cure to his condition - and when that proved beyond her skills or her means, the witch made sure that her heirs knew of the debt and would work to see it paid.
And so it was that, in the Seventeenth Century, Sir Guillaume awoke in the medusa's cave, in the company of an old woman, a middle-aged woman, and a girl still a few years shy of twenty, all three of whom bore a certain familial and professional resemblance to the witch he'd "just" been fighting alongside.
While properly grateful for the rescue from his stone state, the knight was also greatly dismayed to find himself so far out of his own time, particularly when he learned how the rise of gunpowder weapon was changing the modern battlefield. Armored soldiers were not out just yet, but knighthood as Sir Guillaume knew it had become a thing of the past, at least in the mundane world.
Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that the time-lost knight chose to immerse himself wholly in the shadows of the supernatural. With the guidance of the coven, he began hunting local threats, and when those ran out, he was directed to trustworthy individuals in neighboring areas that might guide him to new dangers.
And so it went for the next decade, a semi-solitary crusade that served as a much-needed point of familiarity for a man out of time. As he traveled farther and saw more of the modern world, Sir Guillaume was gradually able to come to terms with his fate, at least enough to not appear as anything worse than a strange traveler with unusually heavy luggage to the regular people that he met. He also earned the favors that would see his shield, armor, and hammer brought to their full potential, particularly with one magus whose family Crest held a number of spells and rituals for working with "proper" weaponry, and who was positively delighted to have a chance to use them.
"Not much love for guns among magi?" you venture.
"Definitely not at the time," Balthazar agrees. "Some families are getting more interested nowadays, but even then, it's mostly in weapons from a century or two back."
In dealing with this arcanist, Sir Guillaume's unfortunate time as a statue turned out to be advantageous on two levels. For one thing, few of the medusae left in the world were blessed with even a degraded form of the eyes of their legendary ancestor, and consequently, there were few souls who'd been exposed to such power - much less recovered from it! The opportunity to examine such a one was worth no small amount to the magus, and allowed Sir Guillaume an alternative to paying the woman in coin. Secondly, as the knight's panoply had been turned to stone along with him - another source of valuable data! - the magus was able to draw upon the "memory" of armor, shield, weapon, and user all being joined together as one solid mass of stone, and through that leverage various metaphysical principles as she enhanced the gear.
The memory of the weight of stone is primarily what empowered Sir Guillaume's Bashing Shield, whereas the resilience of rock and its lack of obvious weak-points - at least as compared to an organic body - was drawn upon for the fortification property of his armor.
While his upgraded equipment served him well for several years, it ultimately was not sufficient to keep Sir Guillaume alive indefinitely. Indeed, drawing upon the metaphysical properties of stone introduced the very weakness that finally killed him, as he went up against a demon of a type renowned for its ability to dig through solid rock with supernatural speed. While this didn't precisely overcome the mundane strength of steel, it did compromise a portion of the defensive enhancements that the knight had come to rely upon, resulting in the rents and holes that you've seen in parts of his armor. The damage to the Bashing Shield is also the result of that encounter, some of it from defensive use, but more because, after being unexpectedly wounded, Sir Guillaume was distracted enough for his enemy to disarm him - not literally, thankfully - and while he was quick to draw a blade to replace his hammer, the demon's own rocky hide proved largely impervious.
Thus, the knight had to rely almost entirely upon his shield's enhanced striking power to finish the fight, and in doing so, compromised his defense enough that wounds which might have been survivable were added to, with the end result being fatal.
The reason that the Bashing Shield and the Fortified Armor ended up in Silbern is that Sir Guillaume had been working with a Quincy resident of the town that the stone demon was terrorizing. Against most other demons, the Quincy would have refused the help of an outsider, but this creature's ability to move underground and detect prey by vibration made it a difficult target to find or hit, and a dangerous one to play "tag" with, particularly when the spirit-archer's skills and the local level of spiritual particles were not sufficient for him to use the Flying Leg technique.
Sir Guillaume had argued that a knight in full, magically reinforced armor was better-suited to draw the beast out and keep it engaged, above-ground, long enough for the Quincy to get a clear shot, and the young archer had agreed to the plan. The knight's death saw him buried with honor by the Quincy, along with his possessions, but some years later, the tomb was desecrated by a grave-robber, a nephew and potential heir to the magus who had enchanted Sir Guillaume's equipment for him. This man felt that, with the knight's death, his panoply ought to be retrieved to protect the mysteries imbued into them - and to give him any advantage in securing his claim as his aunt's successor. He also decided that, since he was digging up Sir Guillaume's corpse, he might as well take it, too, just in case there were any post-mortem effects from the long-ago petrification that might be useful.
The Quincy disagreed, took back Sir Guillaume's remains, and sent what was left of the magus back to his relatives in a box. To prevent further desecrations, the knight's body was cremated, while his equipment was taken to the nearest Wandenreich outpost and entrusted to their superior security for safe-keeping. Shield and armor were then relocated to Silbern and placed in the memorial hall.
Gained Bashing Shield
Gained Broken Fortified Armor
While there are several suits of more conventional magical armor still to be considered, the one that really caught your eye a moment ago was the set that appeared to be made of wood. You turn your attention back to it now and take a closer look.
Right off, you can tell that it's not some arboreal equivalent to plate armor. The most significant piece is the breastplate and the directly attached bits, with lesser coverage for the limbs in the form of bracers, greaves, and additional bits of wood backed by a mix of leather and fur, as well as a large shield. Vine-and-leaf patterns crawl along the entire suit, managing to look almost like natural formations in the wooden pieces, while elsewhere they're obviously the result of intelligent design - if a rather asymmetrical one.
When you reach out and touch one of the plates, it feels like wood and even returns the expected knock when you rap a knuckle against it, yet when you consider the weight of the thing, it seems entirely too heavy for its size. Experimenting with the shield confirms that impression, making you feel more like you're holding a piece of metal than one of wood.
The whole set radiates moderate Abjuration and Augmentation, though the source of the enhancements is clearly of a spiritual nature rather than an arcane one - and more than that, a wild one that you've felt once before today.
"Druid-work," Briar identifies it, before you've finished shaping the thought. "I'm not sure, but I think the armor might be enchanted with the Spell of Ironwood. That's a sixth-circle spell that makes wooden objects as strong as steel, at the cost of also making them as heavy as steel." She looks up at you. "Do you suppose Greenspeaker made this?"
He WAS a sixth-circle druid, true, but the Literary Vision about the Shatterstick said that it was almost the only one of the man's possessions to survive his final fight intact. The armor and shield in front of you look perfectly whole, which really doesn't tally with such a claim, especially when you know what sort of damage Quincy can do when they're trying to kill something.
"I've been wondering about that myself, since you pulled his name out of that Book of yours," Ambrose interjects from his hovering chair. "I know John wasn't wearing anything like this when I met him, but he certainly could have made it later - would have had good reason to, too, given what happened to him. Still, whether they're his work or not, it's a safe bet that armor and shield are both wild armor."
"That's a new term by me," you state after a moment.
"Likewise," Urahara says.
"Oh! I know this one!" Briar says.
Ambrose and Balthazar gesture for the fairy to continue.
"Okay, so, Alex; you know how shapeshifting spells usually cause whatever you're wearing or carrying at the time to fuse into your new form and stop working until you turn back? Well, druidic shapeshifting has a similar safeguard built in - at least once they get good enough at it to use the ability reliably, I've heard some stories about novices getting into trouble while they're first learning it."
"Funny stories?" you ask.
"Some of them, yes. Others, only in a 'glad that wasn't me' kind of way."
Ah. "Continue."
"Anyway, some druids WAY back when figured that, as much fun as it was to turn into bears and elementals and other big smashy things to crush their enemies, it'd be even better if they could turn into ARMORED big smashy things, and they eventually worked out how to make whatever armor their human forms were wearing... not so much change to accommodate their new form, as reinforce it to the same overall degree. And since the enhancement was created to let them turn into beasts and get violent, armor enhanced in that way was called 'wild'."
Informative.
Now, what do you want to do with this curious wooden armor?
Assuming for the moment that this "wild" property only works for druidic shapeshifting, rather than shapeshifting in general-
"That is the case," Ambrose replies.
-the major property of this wooden armor doesn't offer anything to you or the majority of people you know. While studying it might potentially allow you to work out an equivalent property that applies to arcane polymorphs, the only individuals in your very extended circle of acquaintances who might be able to use the wild armor to its full extent are Koron and Mrs. Lawson.
Your Kokiri tutor is entirely too small to wear this wooden breastplate and its matching pieces, and more than that, he's never changed shape or even talked about doing so in all the time you've known him. Given that he and his fellow priests aren't that powerful - there's a REASON why you're able to call all three of them up with a single spell, after all - there is a distinct possibility that Koron isn't capable of shapeshifting, which would make the armor's major selling point worthless to him.
As for Mrs. Lawson, while her demonstrated capabilities make her seem more than powerful enough to get some mileage out of the Druidic Armor, unless of course she follows a take on that mystical tradition which foregoes shapeshifting for some reason-
"I can confirm that she has not," Ambrose notes.
"...she turned into an animal to chase you off because you annoyed her, didn't she," you state rather than guess.
"She turned into a BEAR to chase me off because I annoyed her," the wizard agrees.
"She did seem to like bears," Briar notes, while Balthazar wordlessly facepalms.
-you've talked to her in person all of one time. You have nowhere NEAR a good enough relationship to be dropping a gift like this on her, and you are quite sure she'd be very annoyed to owe you for it.
That leaves the possibility of somebody using the armor just for its mundane and magical defensive value, and again, there's not much call for it. Most of your friends aren't trained to wear armor and wouldn't find it compatible with their fighting styles, while those who do use such defensive equipment have access to stuff that's at least this good - and that potentially before it's even been enchanted.
With no practical application for the Druidic Armor and nothing to learn from it that you couldn't get off of the shield, you decide to leave it.
The wilding enhancement on the shield is no more useful to you or anyone you know than its armor-based counterpart, but a shield is a shield, and rather more of your friends could use or be taught to use it without screwing up their whole approach to combat. Between its magically altered material strength and the defensive enhancement applied over that, the large wooden shield is at least competitive with most magical shields you've seen, short of one of those massive things some of the Memorians were using.
Seriously, those were practically the size of DOORS; if the legionaries weren't undead and thus tireless, you'd have to wonder how long they could carry something like that without wearing themselves out.
Anyway, the Druidic Shield at least has some future utility once you're done using it as a study guide, so it's worth taking.
But first, you have questions, and your Dark Self has the means to find the answer.
The subsequent Spell of Literary Vision confirms that the Druidic Shield and Armor were created by Greenspeaker, and also verifies Ambrose's guess that the displaced drug-using druid created them after his return to Earth and trip back to Boston. They weren't the first pieces of magical armor that John Mason made for himself, but most of his previous defensive works had been lost to accumulated battle damage, an outcome he was keen to avoid in the future and took advantage of Earth's more stable environment and his relative anonymity to address.
He did this by enchanting the Shield to be able to repair itself, a trait that relied on its nature as once-living wood and its maker's own command of magic drawn so heavily from life-force and living things. It's this property that accounts for why the Druidic Shield - and the matching Armor - are both in one piece after Greenspeaker's last stand. They were indeed shot to pieces by the Wandenreich force that finally put down the maddened druid, and while the pierced and burnt remains were taken back to Silbern for examination - because the Quincy really wanted to know what the hell had happened to turn an apparent human being into the mind-warping, shape-twisting, howling mad thing that they'd fought - the broken gear would normally have been disposed of.
But some time after the Druidic Shield was dropped off in the research division, one of the Quincy scientists noticed that the broken piece of defensive gear did not appear quite so broken as she remembered. While not convinced that she wasn't misremembering things, the researcher did things properly scientifically, taking measurements of the Shield's dimensions and properties, waiting a day, and then doing it again and comparing her results.
It took a while to confirm, but the Shield was growing back - and as it passed certain thresholds of wholeness, the process accelerated, growth that had previously taken weeks happening in just days, and then hours.
The Wandenreich were understandably VERY interested in this process, which is why Greenspeaker's Armor and Shield weren't being stored in the same place as the Shatterstick. For whatever reason, he'd not applied the regrowth enhancement to his weapon-
"The 'Stick was meant to smash artifice and constructs," Ambrose muses. "Trying to bind a purely creative or re-creative force to something so inherently destructive could have been too difficult for him."
"Or he could have just been driven out of Boston before he had a chance to do all the work he wanted," Balthazar says.
"Also a possibility."
-so while the wrecking club was left on display, the Armor and Shield were moved to one of the labs.
The info in the Leatherbound Book doesn't go into too much detail about what the Quincy learned from studying Greenspeaker's work, only that they hadn't been able to replicate the regrowth function for any of their equipment. The same properties that allowed it to work for once-living materials made it incompatible with non-living ones like spirit metal - possibly ESPECIALLY like that stuff, which you know to be created wholly by the Quincy, making it an entirely unnatural substance as far as any druid should be concerned.
Gained Greenspeaker's Shield
The thought of what you could do with an enchantment that gives magic items the ability to repair themselves is a most amusing one - but when you consider that a druidic enhancement would probably be limited to plant and animal products that hadn't been too heavily processed, and MAYBE unworked stone and crystal, it becomes a bit less alluring.
Setting that aside for now, you get on with inspecting the remaining pieces of armor in this collection, turning back to that other helmet that drew your eye when you were looking for the Masked Helm of Vulcan.
Visually, there doesn't seem to be anything too noteworthy about this armored headgear. It's certainly well-made enough to not look out of place in company with the suits of plate armor you've seen today, or what the knights of your acquaintance have worn, but there's no sigils of power, dramatic totems, or other mystical glowy bits to suggest what it is or does. Looking at it through your mystical senses reveals a powerful aura of Elemental Light with hints of Fire about it, as well as bits of Spirit that you don't think undead creatures would much care to meet.
"Doesn't look like much, does it?" Ambrose asks rhetorically. "Try putting it on."
You look at him for a moment, then pick up the helmet and hand it to your Dark Self.
Sighing, Shadow Alex sets the Leatherbound Book down on a nearby stand, takes the headpiece from you, and slides it on - and as soon as it starts to settle into place, the steel ripples and glows as the true form of the helm is revealed.
Constructed of bright silver and steel polished to a mirror-like sheen, the helm bears a raised, four-armed crest that rises from the brow and sweeps back along the sides of the head. Low-hanging segments that initially overhang your Shadow's nose, cheeks, and chin visibly shrink and shift for a proper fit that still covers all but his eyes and a narrow section over the mouth, while the back is fully enclosed. By far the most remarkable element of its design is the jewels, consisting of half a dozen bright yellow diamonds, over twice as many dark green, red-speckled bloodstones, and almost thirty pale opals. Between the stones and the metal, the helm casts back the light of the overhead bulbs as half of a rainbow, seeming to fill the room.
Shiny...
"There is a variation of the somewhat bafflingly popular item known as the Helm of Brilliance," Ambrose says. "The usual model is designed so that each of those stones carries a one-time use of a particular spell, with diamonds being able to invoke a Prismatic Spray, rubies carrying a Wall of Fire, fire opals being charged with full-strength Fireballs, and the common opals imbued with Daylight. In addition, the Helm radiates light when undead creatures are nearby, causing them harm, it bestows a remarkable degree of resistance to fire upon the wearer, and upon command, it can sheathe a weapon the wearer is wielding in flame, just as if it had been enchanted."
That sounds very nice, which makes you wonder what Ambrose finds "baffling" about the Helm.
"Well, for starters, if all of the gems are used up or even just removed, the Helm loses all of its powers and the jewels crumble to dust. More than one greedy or even attempting-to-be-generous soul has been disappointed by that fact, as I'm sure you can imagine. But the thing that genuinely bewilders me about Helms of Brilliance is that they're always unstable, to the point where the bloody things may EXPLODE if exposed to a fire intense enough to overcome their inherent resistance to flame - and if THAT happens, every damned gem that retains its magic goes off at once."
...
You slowly turn back to Shadow Alex, who has gone as stiff as a board.
"Oh, don't worry," the wizard says, waving one hand. "That's not a standard Helm of Brilliance."
"What, does it just blind everybody if it blows up?" your Dark Self asks sharply.
"No. This is what's known as a Helm of Reclamation. As I'm sure you've noticed, it's more attuned to Elemental Light than it is to Fire, which changes its properties. The diamonds on this one cast Sunbursts instead of Prismatic Sprays, the bloodstones cast Searing Light, and it neither has nor grants any special resistance to fire - but it also doesn't explode if it gets heated up."
"You couldn't have mentioned that SOONER?"
"Oh, come off it, lad; do you REALLY think I'd leave something potentially explosive out in the open like that?"
You and your Shadow open your mouths to answer-
"WHEN I'd be in the blast radius?" the wizard adds, before you can speak.
-stop, trade glances, and then sigh and close your mouths, conceding the point.
Seeing that it's not going to explode on you - or your Shadow, as the case may be - that the various powers of the Helm promise to be effective or even super-effective against corpse-demons, and that you could potentially learn the Spell of Searing Light if you examined a few of those bloodstones very carefully, you decide to keep the dazzling thing.
You also make a note to investigate how the non-perishable powers of the Helm interact with Illusion Magic, particularly Spells of Invisibility, because that thing is VERY shiny, and you're going to need to hide its presence if you want to use it in Sunnydale.
Or anywhere, really.
Your Dark Self removes the dazzling headgear to set it into the ring of Goddesses figurines, and the gleam of silver, steel, and gemstones fades to nothing as the disguised form reappears.
You and Shadow Alex trade speaking glances, uncertain if that change might interfere with the Spell of Literary Vision. Rather than waste his limited mana on a potential failure, your doppelganger dons the Helm of Reclamation once more-
*Gleam*
-steps into the circle himself, and touches the open pages of the Leatherbound Book to his metal headgear as he casts the spell.
Based on the dazzling, multi-colored nature and Light Elemental aspect of the thing, you'd had a feeling that the Helm of Reclamation was originally the property of the Sorcerer Hong. That impression turns out to be half right, as Hong IS the one who empowered the Helm, but he didn't use it himself: partly because he didn't care to wear heavy headgear; partly because of concerns that it might interact poorly with his Headband of Arcane Energy - specifically, that their respective ray-shooting properties might trigger one another; and partly because the Helm was not of a proper Chinese design, and thus was completely unsuitable for the Emperor to wear.
"Then why did he make it that way?" Briar asks.
"He only ENCHANTED the Helm," your Shadow explains. "The PHYSICAL side of its creation was outsourced." He tilts the Book slightly. "Seems Hong was kind of ticked about that."
"It makes sense, though," you say. "What kind of emperor works in a smithy?"
"A dwarven one would," Ambrose answers, before your Dark Self can reply. "Assuming there ever WAS a dwarf emperor, at least; they usually stop at kings and queens..."
Anyway, Hong made the Helm of Reclamation not for himself, but for one of his few trusted minions, a warrior who served as bodyguard, enforcer, and general face-wrecker, as needed. This "Imperial Guard" was present when the Wandenreich attacked Hong, and stood in defense of his master at least long enough to use up a few of the Helm's offensive powers, before taking a hit that snapped the chin straps and sent the Helm flying. The blow did not kill the warrior, but what happened to him being separated from his shiny skullcap isn't clear, as he was unable to retrieve it before one of the Quincy - who'd managed to track the Helm through its transformation into its more modest unattended form, even in the middle of the fight - snapped it up and made off with it.
Once back in Silbern, the Helm of Reclamation was subjected to tests that gradually revealed the item's functions, at the cost of several of its gems and some damage to one of the labs. Between the limited-use nature of the spells contained within the jewels, the difficulty in hiding the Helm's sheer shininess, and the fact that it clashed rather terribly with their standing uniforms, it was decided that the thing would serve better as another token of the battle in Taiwan.
Though it would seem that witnessing the effects of Sunburst and Searing Light inspired some of the Quincy researchers to try coming up with equivalent effects. Even as single-use weapons, they could be highly beneficial.
In your head, you see a Soldat pulling something that looks like a shiny gem from his pocket and flinging it, grenade-like, at a crowd of Shinigami, who are caught in the resulting Sunburst and left blinded and (sun)burned. You also picture the Soldat doing the same to a bunch of Hollows, with the blast largely disintegrating the masked undead spirits.
Gained Helm of Reclamation
As Shadow Alex steps out of the ring of Goddess statues, removes the Helm of Reclamation, and tucks it into a Bag of Holding for transport, you look at the remaining suits of armor.
There are several sets, some of them steel, others leather, which have kind of been pressed together in groups. You're informed that these bear only basic enhancements, which tallies with what your Mage Sight picks up, and none of them feel particularly special to your technically non-magical supernatural senses, nor were they found with paintings, emblems, or notes that suggested enough historical significance to make them worth investigating with Literary Vision.
On that note...
Of the remaining stuff, there's a matching set of plate meant for rider and mount, set up so that the "knight" appears to be properly ahorse, shield hanging off of the saddle. It's the biggest thing in the room, but it was set up at the back - they appear to have pulled a couple of shelves out to make space for the stand - out of the direct light, which contributed to your initial lack of attention. Adding to that is the fact that the armor was fashioned from a dull black metal and lacks much in the way of color on its surcoats, with only white and deep red trim offering any relief. The knight's helm and the horse's headpiece both bear horns and monstrous visages, both suits and the shield menace with subtle skull emblems and short spikes - the latter placed so that they won't guide an enemy's weapon to a vulnerable point - and the rider's pauldrons are large.
For all of that, the armor and its enhancements don't feel particularly questionable, merely a bit more potent than the "regular" armors you just glossed over, and perhaps a bit... sneaky.
As you're considering this panoply, Ambrose sits and speaks up. "Arthur had a request for this one, just so you're aware."
"Oh?"
"He was hoping that we'd leave the set together for the time being. He said something about not wanting to separate a fellow knight and his horse, which... knights." The wizard shrugs, making a dismissive gesture with one hand. "Aside from that bit of pure sentimentality, though, he was also hoping to identify the original owner. The lack of heraldry complicates that a bit, but the design is... distinctive."
To say the least.
One of the last suits for your consideration is a set of hide armor, tucked into the rear corner near the Black Rider's Armor where you couldn't immediately see it. This suit is fashioned from sections of thick grey skin that immediately makes you think of an elephant, a rhinoceros, or maybe a hippopotamus - there are no tusks, horn, or great flat teeth present to suggest which is the case. Aside from its obvious defensive enhancement, there is Augmentation Magic woven about the thing, energy that carries a sense of... momentum.
Probably not made from hippos, then. Maybe.
Finally, in the opposite corner from the grey suit, there is what you can only describe as a tiger pelt, complete with a fuzzy, whiskered, fang-filled muzzle to be worn over the head. Despite looking thinner than the elephant or rhino hide, this armor actually feels like it might be more potent defensively, and there is another enhancement upon it that whispers of aggressive movement.
"Aw, the poor kitty," Shadow Briar says mournfully.
You blink at that and turn to your partner. "I thought you hated cats."
"SMALL cats, sure, they've chased and tried to eat me in the past. A big cat has never done anything worse to me than to be distantly related to small cats, and it would be silly to think worse of them for something so completely out of their control."
...
"...have you ever MET-?"
"No."
You can find some uses for the sets of leather armor. While they're definitely not the sort of thing people could go about wearing in modern society without getting a lot of unwanted attention, they're one of the lighter and more flexible types of body armor available, making them relatively easy to learn how to wear and properly use in a fight. If you wanted to get your family and your friends in Sunnydale accustomed to wearing armor, these would be a good place to start - assuming the size-adjusting enchantments on the suits can reduce them far enough to fit typical nine-going-on-ten-year-olds. Larry would probably be okay, but you're less sure about Cordy or Amy...
They definitely won't fit Zelda, though, not for years to come, unless you add an enhancement for that purpose. Given you've already promised to make her a martial arts outfit for her birthday and wouldn't have too much trouble imbuing THAT with as much defensive power as any of these suits have to offer, increasing the power of the leather armor's re-sizing magic isn't really needed.
Another option would be to use some or all these unremarkable suits of leather armor as reagents, sacrificing them to increase the defensive value of another set of leather armor, such as La Renarde's already more impressive Glamered Armor, which somebody COULD wear in plain sight thanks to its existing enhancement.
As for the other stuff, while you've seen lamellar armor in some of the books you've read and through other media, this is the first time you've had the opportunity to really study this style, much less a magical example of it. The fact that the suits before you all appear to be of Chinese origin is another point of interest, but since they all look and feel pretty close to identical, you figure you really only need one of them.
With the plate armor, you're mostly hoping to glean some insights into how to improve your skills at crafting the actual armor. That said, you could still learn a thing or two from examining somebody else's approach to the basic defensive wards, particularly when they've been applied to something as large and physically complicated as a suit of full plate.
Gained Enchanted Armor
You decide to honor Arthur's request-via-wizard and even to throw him a bone by having Shadow Alex cast Literary Vision on it - although in all honesty, you probably would have done that anyway. You're likely just as curious about the history of this dark armor as Altria's father is, if perhaps for different reasons.
Looking the set over, it's readily apparent that the armors saw extensive use in their time. Quite aside from the holed or outright missing sections of plate that the surcoat and caparisons have been carefully arranged to hide or at least soften, and which are probably evidence of their owners' last battle, there are plenty of scratches, worn edges, slight dents, blunted or broken tips, and slightly off-color sections that speak of older damage and attempts at repair. The shield is in similar condition, though its lack of covering fabric makes the accumulated wear and tear (and puncture) more obvious.
Rather than try to wrestle the "knight" down onto the floor or try to take a reading off of the entire set at once, you simply remove the shield from its place on the saddle and hand it to your Dark Self for the circle.
Over the course of the day, you've read of individuals and groups that - like the Drakes and the Pritchards - have preserved and continued to employ combat styles relying on supposedly obsolete melee weapons and armor well into the age of gunpowder and even up to the modern day. You've also learned of a few ways in which said people have gone bad, and the Shield of the Black Knight is linked to another example of such - although not quite in the way its dark steel and skull-and-spikes style would suggest.
The Shield was created in Italy in 1520 as a replacement for the Black Knight's previous shield, which had been destroyed in combat with a renegade mage-knight and the sorceress he served. The Shield's maker was a local smith, who was surely pleased to be of service to the man who'd freed his town and its neighbors from the unnatural tyranny they'd had to endure, yet was also greatly unsettled by the decidedly un-heroic style of his liberator's armor, or that worthy's insistence on his new shield being in the exact same st
yle as the ruined one. And this led to an explanation, which is carried through by the Spell of Literary Vision.
The Black Knight - who gave no name - claimed to be the descendant of a knight who had been every bit the villain that the dark armor would suggest, and had tormented a "distant land" for almost twenty years before an opponent managed to slay him. Death did not long hold this blackguard, however, and whether by dint of sorcerous contrivance or sheer wickedness, his twisted soul possessed and reanimated its fallen corpse. Retaining the strength, skill, and cunning he'd had in life, and now adding to it the tireless nature and unholy power of the undead, the first Black Knight became a true plague upon the land, one that would last for another thirty years and through several more temporary deaths before he was finally put down by his great-grandson.
The victorious young knight had considered the matter of his ancestor's many crimes and wondered why it had taken so long for someone to put the monster down the first time. Had he been slain before he could accumulate the power or sheer evil potential to rise from his unquiet grave, had he simply been imprisoned, much death and suffering could have been averted. Why, then, had things gone the way they did?
The answer, it would seem, lay with the mystical threats of the world...
Warriors with the power, skill, cunning, and nerve necessary to triumph over monsters, magic-users, demons, and other such threats to humanity were uncommon enough to begin with, and those possessing the capability and the sheer will required to make a successful career out of doing so were few and far between. As a consequence of that, it was not uncommon for such individuals to be afforded greater leniency by their in-the-know peers and overlords than rank and custom would normally have allowed, particularly in such matters as undeclared border crossings, desecration of tombs, or possession of unhallowed arcana - strictly temporary, of course.
Giving a heavily-armed warrior too MUCH leeway was seldom a good thing, particularly not in combination with the fatigue, temptations, and horrors that any fighter against the dark must face, and so wise souls would arrange for their champions to have some form of support structure - an order of fellow knights, a network of royal agents, or an arm of the Church - that could double as both counsel and watchdog. They might also keep a squad of crossbowmen squirreled away, in case the dark day came when they were needed...
Sadly, not all kings are so wise, and not all of those that are also possess the wealth or human resources required for such an undertaking. Sometimes, there is no mortal oversight at all; there is just one man, in the right place at the right time to try and do the right thing - and then to try to do it again, and again, and AGAIN, until the things he sees and does and fails to do finally break him.
It is questionable if the original Black Knight was ever trying to do right by anyone but himself, yet he was a capable warrior in a place and time that greatly needed one, and so his less-than-sterling qualities were ignored in favor of his martial service - and that, he performed most admirably. Time and again he faced the evils of the world alone, time and again he triumphed, and time and again his liege-lord asked him only if he had been victorious, without considering the methods, the costs, or the profits involved - and certainly not giving the possibilities of the future more than a passing, hopeful thought.
And so, there was no one to notice as the Black Knight fell from whatever grace he had once held, embracing the darkness in its stead. Clever and capable and so often alone as he was, hiding his descent from his king and fellow knights proved no great challenge, and when at last the tales of his villainy grew so dire and numerous that they could no longer be dismissed as hearsay or rumor, he had become too strong for any of the brave souls of that nation to stop. It took decades for a worthy challenger to finally put the man down, and then decades more for another to ensure that the monster he'd become would STAY down.
While the case of the Black Knight was something of a perfect storm of poor circumstances, it was hardly a unique incident: many another knight or man-at-arms who had faced the Forces of Darkness had ended up becoming their tool in the end; and many more were the townsfolk and peasants who turned to questionable sources for aid against some supernatural menace, or even mundane hardship, only to become a new evil in their turn.
All of this led the young knight to decide that, since there was no earthly agent monitoring humanity's supernatural defenders for corruption and treachery, he would become such a force. Though he would not shy away from slaying deserving monsters or demons that crossed his path - especially not those that were responsible for turning good men and women against their own kind - the focus of his life would be to seek out those souls in whom human evil and supernatural power merged, and crush them before they could become something worse.
As part of that plan, he took his ancestor's panoply as his own. This was one part pure practicality - for it was a well-made suit of armor, enchanted and empowered through numerous battles, and once purged of the stain of his great-grandfather's evil, it served him well - but there were other considerations, such as trying to leverage the Black Knight's grim appearance and reputation to strike fear into his foes, and also to try and redeem the name and the armor of the same evil associations.
That had been ten years before the replacement of the broken shield, and the arrangement seemed to be working out for the new Black Knight - and it would go on working, as shown by the list of battles (predominantly but not exclusively against wicked humans) that appears in your Leatherbound Book. For almost as long as his forebear had been a blight upon the world, the successor rode and fought as a grim guardian, bringing justice to the unjust and doom to the damned.
And then, like his great-grandfather before him, the day came when the Black Knight fell in battle.
And once again, the bearer of that title did not STAY dead.
Among those who knew of the second Black Knight's origins were some that, upon learning of his fate, declared that taking his ancestor's panoply had been a grave error. Clearly, a subtle and conditional curse of undeath must have lingered within the dark armor despite attempts to cleanse and redeem it, waiting out the long years until its inheritor finally died while wearing the suit and only then activating.
Other well-informed individuals felt that the original purgation of the Black Knight's Armor had been successful, but that having been cursed once had left the equipment vulnerable to being cursed anew, whether by "accident" via the decades' worth of built-up spite from the many fallen soul the self-sworn guardian had laid low, or by deliberate intent on the part of one of them - or perhaps a patron entity that had grown tired of having its twisted toys taken away.
A few considered that the cause of the new Black Knight's return as one of the undead might be no fault of his own, with some opportunistic and well-placed necromancer having found his body and his armor and worked their dark magic upon it to create a new and powerful servant for themselves - though if that were the case, the knight's "master" must not have had long to enjoy their new "servant."
For more ignorant parties who had always believed that the original Black Knight had never truly been slain, and had simply gone on a decades-long crusade against other, lesser evils as some dark personal amusement or in an attempt to root out and destroy perceived potential rivals, the death and reanimation of the second "incarnation" was seen as nothing of the sort. Rather, it was taken as proof that they had been right all along, and that the rumors of the undead monster's humanity had been nothing more than lies.
In point of fact, it was none of these that truly caused the second Black Knight to reanimate. While the dark history of his inherited armor and the fact that many of the wicked had died non-magically cursing him may have made it easier, the forces that truly bound him to the physical plane past his own death were the terms of his vow and the strength of his conviction.
He had sworn to hunt down supernaturally empowered human evil, and that task remained unfinished. The cruelties of the world and the horrors lurking in the dark still drove well-meaning souls to seek power to protect themselves and their loved ones, and demons, fallen spellcasters, and books of unholy lore still led those would-be heroes astray.
He was. Not. DONE.
And so the Black Knight rose and rode again, transformed into an undead scourge upon the world almost as his ancestor had been, save that his oath bound him to reserve his wrath only for deserving targets.
On the face of it, this might seem to have been a good deal, for undeath augmented the warrior's physical prowess and magnified his supernatural powers, making him untiring, unyielding, and nigh-unstoppable. Unfortunately, the Knight's new state of existence tainted everything he was and did with the cold essence of necrotic energy. Where before his presence had been intimidating, now it was chilling, a cold knife against the throats of his quarry and a grim weight upon all others. Animals fled his coming if they could and cowered when they could not, and if he lingered in an area too long, they and the weak-minded among humanity would sometimes go mad with fear, while sickness and blight spread about him. Other undead would seek the Black Knight out, some seeing a rival to contest with, others desiring to serve, and more sensing his nature as a judge and punisher of human evils and wishing for vengeance upon their tormentors and killers.
Perhaps most concerning was the fact that, as time wore on, the Black Knight ceased to look to the defense of the innocent, becoming solely concerned with the judgment of the wicked. As hardened and grim as he had become by his later years of mortality, he never quite lost his capacity for charity, mercy, and kindness - and certainly not the basic need for companionship, even if it was fleeting and among strangers - but when undeath claimed him, those sentiments gradually faded away.
Needing no sleep, food, or drink, the Black Knight never patronized another inn or public house, nor carried rations or water. Never again would he slip a few extra coins to those who served him well or at their own expense, share a meal with a fellow traveler, or give alms at church. No more did he rate the safety of hostages and bystanders as equally important to the capture or death of those that threatened them; the hunt was all, and if the innocent suffered or died in the process of bringing the wicked to justice, then that was simply their fate.
The shift in priorities was not immediate or absolute, but it was inexorable, and after a century of undeath, the Black Knight's last lingering embers of humanity had been reduced to fitful ashes.
That was when the Wandenreich finally descended to lay him to rest. Prior to this, the Quincy had known of and at times worked with the Black Knight in his mortal life, and when he died and came back, they withheld their arrows out of respect for past comradery and because they wished to see just where on the scale of undeath the man's lingering spirit finally came down.
An indiscriminate predator and spawner of other monstrosities such as a Hollow or a corpse-demon would never have been allowed to continue to exist, but an oathbound revenant, driven to hunt only the worst among humanity, was... tolerable.
Yet as the decades rolled on and the Black Knight's gradual decline became apparent, the Wandenreich began trying to convince him to lay down his arms and end his quest. He had not sworn to hunt down ALL human evil, not even all of that which touched the supernatural, and no one mortal soul could or should be responsible for the entire world; he had done his part, the rest was the responsibility of others. More than that, it was now clear that if he continued to pursue his oath, he might well become the sort of monster he had sought to eradicate, and that was something the Quincy could not allow.
And when their entreaties failed and the Black Knight grew still colder and more calculating and indifferent to the sanctity of lives and souls, the Wandenreich did as they had warned him they would, and ended his undead existence - though possibly not his immortal one.
"'And when the arrow struck home, the Black Knight lowered his ruined blade, looked his old friend-turned-executioner in the eye, and said plainly, 'Thank you'.'" Shadow Alex reads out. "'With its anchor to its battered shell severed beyond repair by the destructive power of the Quincy, his weary soul slipped its mortal coil at last, oath fulfilled with the death of one final monster in the making.'"
The Black Knight's panoply was taken back to Silbern not only as a memorial, but also to prevent anyone else from trying to take up the mantle again and potentially walking - or riding - a similar path into undeath.
Gained Black Knight's Gear
"Okay, did I hear that last bit correctly?" you ask of the room at large. "Because it sounded like the Wandenreich managed to kill the Black Knight without rendering his soul down to spare spiritual particles in the process, and I had the impression that wasn't something they could avoid doing."
"There's a difference between destroying a corporeal undead and destroying a spiritual one," Urahara replies. "As damaging as Quincy spiritual power is to a soul, if they're fighting something that has a body of physical matter, that body acts as a kind of armor for the soul. It won't stop the Quincy from killing their opponent, but in that case death generally comes about as a result of physical trauma, as opposed to the spiritual variety - which is generally less than what a purely spiritual entity would have sustained if it were wounded by the same attacks."
"On top of that," Ambrose notes from his hover-chair, which is spinning slowly about, "while the undead are a lot hardier than the living on account of not needing all those vital processes and fluids and such, the corporeal ones are still anchored to their bodies. The specifics vary with the kind of walking corpse you're dealing with, but as a rule, if you do enough damage in the right place, you can sever the link between body and soul, at which point the former will drop and the latter will lose its hold on the Material Plane. It's one reason why decapitation is an effective means of disposing of so many of the buggers... unless you're dealing with one of those types that are anchored to the body in multiple points, because that's how you end up with piles of loose body parts trying to kill you." The wizard shrugs. "Fortunately, most necromancers never work out how to create those annoyances."
You consider that and then turn back to Urahara."Out of curiosity, what's the Shinigami policy on corporeal undead?"
"Generally, to dispose of them as soon as possible," Urahara replies. "They may not be Hollows, but it's my understanding that creating almost any undead creature more powerful than your average zombie involves binding a mortal soul to the Living Plane beyond its time, and usually against its will besides." He pauses to look at you and your fellow arcanists.
"Accurate," Ambrose replies, "and thus the sort of thing that ought to professionally if not personally offend any psychopomp."
Urahara tips his hat to the wizard. "Even the truly soulless specimens like zombies and skeletons are better off destroyed, though, both to keep them from freaking out the general population and to prevent them from creating blighted areas. Hollows would enjoy both. To that end, the Academy runs a few classes each year to make sure that every graduate can identify the common types of undead on sight and knows how to deal with them if and when they turn up."
"And when uncommon types of undead turn up?" Briar wonders.
"Standard procedure is for the Shinigami on the ground to keep an eye on the undead to make sure it doesn't attack anybody, and to intervene immediately if necessary, while reporting in what they've found via Soul Pager so that somebody can check the records. If the entity turns out to be something Soul Society has prior experience with and it's within the patroller's ability to handle, they get a tactical update; if it's out of their league, they get a warning to avoid confrontation if possible until backup arrives; and if it's something entirely new or that otherwise merits the attention, a team from Twelfth Division gets sent down to subdue and secure it for transport back."
You nod, seeing that as pretty practical. "What about other groups of psychopomps? Do they exercise similar methods?"
"'Kill on sight' is the general rule, yes."
You turn to the remaining armors, curious to hear what there is to learn about their histories.
Both of the suits of exotic animal-hide armor are concerning for you, given the possibility that their creation involved poaching, the fact that Farore isn't fond of such things, and your outstanding promise to the Goddess of Nature to one day break some legs involved in the unethical business.
That said, using the Spell of Literary Vision to learn the history of these two sets of gear shouldn't offend Farore at all - rather the opposite, really. If the materials used in their making were ethically sourced, it won't be an issue, and if they DO turn out to have been poached... well, then you'll know, and perhaps have some names to investigate.
Shadow Alex starts with the Grey Armor, which turns out to have been created in Africa about three centuries ago, using skin taken from a rhino. The circumstances surrounding the animal's death are not described in detail, but the words called up by the Spell of Literary Vision do state that the wizard who enchanted the armor took advantage of the rhino's lack of wounds when empowering it, which suggests that the animal wasn't killed by violence.
That does leave open the possibility of methods such as poison or the various spells that could kill without damaging the hide, but if the wizard was relying on the rhino's resilience and lack of "defeat" to empower his creation, he would have wanted to avoid compromising that property with workarounds - in which case there is a distinct possibility that the animal died of natural causes. The text in the Leatherbound Book just isn't specific enough for you to be sure, much less to tell what was done with the rest of the body.
Another aspect of the rhino that was exploited for the armor was the species' aptitude for charging down perceived threats. This particular rhino was apparently well-known for its size and aggressive nature, making those qualities easy to reinforce within the Rhino Hide. That feeling of momentum that you detected earlier is the result of this, allowing the warrior that wears the armor to strike with much greater force when charging an opponent, channeling a portion of the sheer power of a fully-grown multi-ton rhino moving in excess of thirty miles an hour - but ONLY a portion!
The Rhino Hide was worn by a series of warriors in the years after its creation, a number of whom were killed due to careless use of its main power. The enhanced charge allowed by the armor was a good first strike tactic, particularly when multiple "Rhino Warriors" were working together in a massed charge-
That implies the existence of other suits of this make, you note in passing.
-but that specific power did not really offer any further advantage in combat, unless or until the wearer could get the space and time necessary to build up to a run once more. Even with the defensive power of the armor, this led to more than one untimely death, as outnumbered and overconfident Rhino Warriors would storm into combat, send one or two enemies flying, and subsequently find themselves surrounded and cut down by angry foes. Alternately, the warriors might charge down monsters or demons tough enough and even heavy enough to withstand the force of their opening attack, and then get taken apart while they were still trying to recover from their own surprise.
Eventually, though, this particular Rhino Hide came into the possession of a warrior who had the physical qualities, the training, and the mindset necessary to make the best use of it. Tall, broad shouldered, and yet swift of foot, this Rhino Warrior proved capable of ploughing through multiple ranks of soldiers without stopping, making him impossible to corral and cut down as so many of his predecessors had been. Though he did nothing so grand as win battles on his own, he survived the fights, learned from them, and became more skilled and dangerous because of it. In time, he learned to channel the Spirit of the Rhino to enhance his physical prowess at all times, and with that became capable of properly contending with supernatural threats - the ones that he didn't devastate with his opening charge into battle, at least.
You are reminded, rather keenly, of a certain Spider-Man villain. On the other hand, this Rhino doesn't seem to have worn a horned helmet, and he definitely wasn't robbing banks...
The Rhino Warrior was active for a period of about fifteen years, getting drawn deeper and deeper into supernatural matters as time went on. His approach to such things was never subtle or complicated, for that is not the nature of the spirit he drew strength from, and when he inevitably encountered obstacles that could not be easily dealt with through sheer force, he tended to grow frustrated and angry.
The Quincy would prove to be such an obstacle.
The particular group of Quincy that the Rhino Warrior would encounter were a far-flung branch of the bloodline that had discovered and subsequently appointed themselves the guardians of a relatively remote region of Africa that was unusually rich in spiritual power, a place whose description reminds you of Karakura, only not so potent. The Quincy did not actually live within the area, instead having settled along its fringes - close enough that they could draw upon the higher ambient level of spiritual particles if needed, but not so close or in such numbers that they risked depleting the source of those same particles - and the motives behind their claimed guardianship were a mix of self-serving and altruistic.
Given their reliance on external sources of spiritual particles, Quincy obviously tend to prefer to live in (or near) areas like this whenever they have the chance, and are likewise not terribly keen on "sharing" the ambient power with necromancers, demons, and other malevolent actors. At the same time, this particular group of the spirit archers had a genuine desire to protect regular humans from the hazards that could be found within their territory, ranging from unusually active and strong spirits and empowered beasts native to the area, to spiritual predators drawn to the area in search of prey, to the potential for the subtler long-term issues that can arise when ordinary souls are exposed to more power than they're used to.
"Does that happen in Karakura?" Briar asks Urahara.
"It's rare, but yes," he admits. "A typical soul can adapt to heightened or reduced levels of ambient spiritual energy without any real issue - at least as long as they're still on the Mortal Plane; dropping someone into the Spiritual Realms can be a lot riskier - but every once in a while you'll find an exception. Abnormally slow spiritual growth, inherently fragile souls, heightened sensitivity or strange affinities that don't react well to the new environment, fresh spiritual wounds that essentially get infected by the more active spiritual ecology - there's a number of ways for the problems to manifest."
Whatever their purpose, the Quincy in that part of Africa didn't have the numbers to keep their claimed territory completely free of intruders. Regular patrols helped, but from time to time someone or something managed to slip across the "border" without their notice.
The Rhino Warrior was one such intruder, having come to the rich spirit ground in an attempt to strengthen his connection to the Rhino Spirit. His motives in this quest were not selfless, for though he was still some years shy of middle age, a decade of combat - much of it against the supernatural - had aged him before his time and begun to weaken his body, and this was a state of affairs that the fighter did not care for. Yet neither was he driven solely by selfishness, for his king and their people relied on his great strength, and the warrior would see them safe if he could.
And so, at the advice of the now-old wizard and other elders, the Rhino Warrior travelled into the heart of the land of the spirits, taking no weapons or tools as he sought to live closer to nature and so to the state of his totem animal, that he might better understand the Rhino and the power it granted him.
To some extent, he succeeded: his growing spiritual presence attracted a Quincy patrol that had previously missed him; and when they tried to drive the Rhino Warrior out with a few intentional near-misses from their Holy Arrows, the archers were VERY surprised to see a near-seven-foot-tall man wreathed in a spectral aura in the shape of a rhino come thundering straight at them as fast as the true beast!
At the same time, the Rhino Warrior considered the outing a failure, for despite having increased his power, he had demonstrably not grown enough to catch the annoying archers or ward off their attacks. Forced to flee the spirit grounds, he was thereafter unable to return and resume his efforts at growth, for the Quincy now knew what his presence felt like and either saw him coming or tracked him down and chased him off much faster than they had the first time.
The warrior refused to try sneaking back in, for stealth is not the way of the Rhino, and while he was wise enough to attempt negotiation, that too was not an aspect of his totem, nor a particular strength of the man himself. Even if it had been, the attempt likely would not have succeeded, for the Quincy were not pleased that an intruder had slipped by them, demonstrably empowered himself off of "their" spiritual grounds, and then - after being allowed to escape - had the nerve to ask for more.
Stubbornness and pride on both sides doomed the diplomatic solution before it could even begin, and after that, there was just frustrated anger and the Rhino's urge to solve problems in the most direct manner: head down and charging, until a way was found or MADE.
Unfortunately for both parties, their territorial dispute was not taking place in a void; other powers in the region had noticed the squabble and begun plotting to take advantage of it. Even among his countrymen, there were those who wished to prevent the Rhino Warrior from growing any stronger, and others who wanted him weakened, be it physically, mystically, or politically - to say nothing of the other nations or the supernatural threats that would prefer to see him dead, or at least crippled. The Quincy had their own batch of ill-wishers eyeing the spiritual grounds and imagining all the things they might achieve with such a resource, if only some meddling spiritualists were not there to interfere.
There was no true unity in the ensuing tangle of schemes, only a mess of hyenas, jackals, and vultures-
"What," your Shadow mutters, "no octopus? No goblin?"
-pursuing their own interests, exploiting and undermining one another in the process. Ultimately, one faction managed to aggravate the Rhino Warrior's grudge against the Quincy to the point where he ventured out to "settle" things with them, which a separate group took advantage of to send an assassin after the man. At the same time, a third party dispatched a band of demonic mercenaries to hit the Quincy while their attention was on the obvious intruder, and a fourth group tracking the movements of THAT force moved to intercept it.
The resulting battle only got worse when the concentration of spiritual power and demonic energy lured one of the meaner predators out of the spirit grounds in response to the apparent challenge.
When all was said and done, the Rhino Warrior lived, but the combination of spiritual damage from Quincy arrows, poison used by his would-be assassin, and wounds taken at the claws of the demons spelled the end of his time as a warrior. The surviving Quincy allowed him to leave with his life, but as recompense for the trouble he had led to them, they took his armor - and just in case he had thoughts about reclaiming it or sending some future successor to do so, they told the warrior that the Rhino Hide would be sent to their "distant cousins, in a land none may enter or depart without their aid."
"Hey, Briar?"
"Yeah?"
"How much do you think my totem affects me?"
There is a curious rumble in your soul.
"...I mean, considering it kind of GORED you once-"
"That was as much my fault for trying to wrestle it-"
"-which is exactly my point. Seriously, if you weren't as stubborn as the Boar, would you have actually tried that?"
...
Okay, she has a point.
You look the others in the room and repeat the question for them.
"While it's true that a person who's reached the point of actively channeling their spirit animal's power can start to take on some of the traits associated with that animal," Balthazar begins, "there's usually some similarities between the two to begin with. Given that I'm fairly certain that we" - he gestures between the two of you - "didn't meet until after you'd started calling on your totem...?"
You nod at the inquiry.
"...then I'm not best-placed to say how much it has or hasn't affected you. I mean, you COULD just naturally be in-tune with your animal spirit; that sort of thing isn't uncommon among people who have a talent for this sort of spiritual activity."
"My observations have similar limits," Urahara adds. "If you were willing to drop that sensor-jamming spell of yours, I could run some tests to see how your soul's been affected by this Boar, but aside from the security risks, that would only tell us how much of an influence the spirit has on you NOW, and perhaps for how long it's been actively influencing you. It wouldn't help figure out what you were like before - which, as Mr. Blake indicated, could be anything from 'perfectly ordinary kid'-"
Briar laughs at that one.
"-to 'basically a boar in a human suit'."
"What they said," Ambrose states, waving at the other two. "I think that, rather than worry about how MUCH your totem spirit has affected you or continues to do so, you'd be better served by being mindful of the fact that it DOES affect you and taking steps to not let yourself go over-boared just because."
The pun is bad, but the advice is reasonable.
Which, given it's Ambrose, is mildly concerning...
You referred to it as a "pelt" in your head, but while there are similarities, the Tigerskin Armor is more substantial than that, offering as much physical coverage as the Rhino Hide armor did, and for less bulk. The more properly armor-like nature of the suit also goes against your brief imagining of Tatsuki dressed as a more traditional oni, clad in tigerskin and wielding a great iron club...
Anyway, when Shadow casts the Spell of Literary Vision again, you learn that the Tiger's Hide originated in India about a century and a half ago. While the material used for the Rhino's Hide armor may have been acquired without doing violence to its original owner, the tigerskin used in this suit of armor was definitely NOT obtained peacefully, as the cat in question was a known man-eater that was hunted down specifically to stop its attacks. Two separate attempts to do so failed, resulting in several hunters being killed themselves and the wounded, frightened survivors carrying back stories of the cat's alarming size and power, as well as its downright unnatural cunning.
Rumors of the "demon cat" reached a holy man who suspected there was more truth to the tale than he would like to admit, and who organized a third hunting party consisting of hunters of the supernatural. While not uninjured in the attempt, they were able to bring the beast down, confirming that dark magic had been used to empower and corrupt the tiger, turning a fierce but natural predator into a rampaging monster.
As the tiger itself had been a victim of the true source of the evil, the priest felt it only proper that the animal's spirit should be allowed a chance to seek justice for the wrong done to it, while also making amends for the lives it had taken. Thus, the creation of this armor from the beast's hide.
Defensively, the Tiger's Hide is superior to the Rhino Hide, being slightly more resistant to direct impacts, less encumbering, and harder to damage in and of itself. On top of that, the sorcerer recruited to empower the armor drew upon the tiger's nature as an apex predator to make the material resistant to the weapons of other animals. Offensively, the wearer can call upon the tiger's spirit and hunting technique to leap upon an enemy and savage them with all the weapons at their disposal - though in keeping with the tiger's preference for ambush, this proved to only work for the opening moments of any given combat.
Once completed, the Tiger's Hide was bestowed on a member of the priest's party, and the lot of them ventured into what had been the tiger's hunting grounds, seeking their quarry...
The hunters had gone in expecting the cause of the tiger's corruption to be the work of an asura or rakshasa, or some other wicked spirit endemic to India. Instead, they encountered a foreign sorceress and a trio of wicked spirits bound to her service, all of whom claimed to be from Japan. It would seem that the relatively recent arrival of the Black Ships had provoked some unpleasant divinatory forecasts for the sorceress and her cohorts if they remained in the Land of the Rising Sun, which had led to their taking a page from a certain monk's book and beginning their own journey to the West.
When questioned about the corruption of the tiger, the sorceress readily admitted to being responsible, stating that she had always admired her homeland's stories of the ferocity and power of the tiger, but had found the reality to be greatly disappointing; thus, she had tried to improve upon a tiger until it met her standards. She had been pleased with the results at first, but seeing intruders before her now, one of them wearing the beast's skin, proved that the animal had ultimately not been worth her time.
Perhaps goaded on by the spirit of the tiger, the warrior wearing the Tiger's Hide armor made a good attempt at showing the sorceress otherwise, but his charge was intercepted by one of the youkai - a tiger youkai, who vowed to demonstrate the difference between himself and his "feeble" mortal kin as a Wall of Force sealed the area, locking the hunters inside an improvised arena with the monster.
Unfortunately for the youkai, he fought with his claws, allowing the Tiger's Hide to show its full defensive worth. It was not enough to completely absorb or redirect the force of his blows, but it robbed them of enough force that claw-strikes which would have shredded many lesser armors and disemboweled the human fighter underneath instead left... survivable wounds. Taken aback by the warrior's resilience, the tiger youkai suffered a number of blows he could not afford, and was subsequently ground down - to the furious dismay of his mistress and allies. Rather than try and rescue their comrade, the villains of the piece took the opportunity to flee while their foes were still trapped inside the Wall, and when the trap finally ran its course and deactivated, the heroes pursued.
So began a "Journey (Back) to the East," as the priest, the tiger-warrior, and their allies pursued the sorceress and her minions across India, up through Nepal, and into and across a stretch of China. Along the way, the hunters were harassed by the two remaining youkai, one a shapeshifter with a dizzying array of forms that would ultimately prove to be a peculiarly malicious tanuki and the other a truly venomous snake. Rather than attacking directly, the pair struck from the shadows, manipulating humans, monsters, and other creatures against their pursuers at every turn. This was oddly easy, for town after town that the heroes visited bore signs of long-term suffering and too-recent disaster, and the residents were desperate and much more willing to take the manipulators' words and bribes than they otherwise might have been.
The trail of devastation was revealed to have been the original path the sorceress and her three youkai henchmen took across the continent after leaving Japan, each sorrowing settlement or ravaged ruin the legacy of their past "entertainment." Eventually, the heroes were able to leverage this fact against their quarry, for they crossed paths with an immortal that had been moving up the other end of the trail, repairing the damage caused by the fiends as best he could while seeking its ultimate causes. The unexpected arrival of a powerful Daoist sorcerer caught the snake youkai by surprise and left her open to a strike by the Indian warriors, which proved fatal.
Then the great deception was revealed, for the serpent's dying body transformed into that of the tanuki, laughing triumphantly that he had been leading his pursuers around by the nose for months. His sister and their mistress had taken a different route and were surely thousands of miles away, somewhere the foolish would-be avengers would never find them.
The immortal snorted at that, performed a Spell of Divination using some of the tanuki's blood, a bit of fur that had belonged to the deceased tiger, and a single scale confirmed to have come from the snake, and told the five hunters they should head to Hong Kong. He would not be joining them, for he had many more wounded lives to try and knit back together, but he did provide spells to speed the travelers on their way...
Even with the immortal's assistance saving them many days' worth of travel, it still took months of travel for the hunters to reach their destination. While hardly uneventful, most of their experiences on their long trip south were less significant than their eastward pursuit of the tanuki had been, being summed up with a few words on the page Shadow Alex is reading from. On top of that, the few incidents that do merit special mention don't have any real connection to one another, beyond being part of five friends' journey through a strange land.
The Indian quintet were still a few weeks out from Hong Kong when they finally picked up the sorceress's trail again, passing through villages that were still recovering from disasters and deaths a year past. Not long after that, the heroes found themselves under attack by assassins, monsters that seemed to appear from out of nowhere, and even in their own nightmares, turned deadly by dark magic.
For all that the sorceress and her remaining youkai servant were once again trying to kill their five pursuers, their efforts were not quite measuring up to the opposition the heroes had faced on the first leg of their journey. The tanuki's powers of deception and knack for (vicious) trickery had made him amazingly annoying for the good guys to deal with, as he could have been anyone, even one of them - and indeed, he HAD played that card on several occasions, whether to get them in trouble with local authorities or spread confusion in their own group. Not only that, but even with the great distances involved, the sorceress and the snake had still been able to assist their ally via magic, using information gathered by the tanuki to guide their efforts: vulnerable minds to target with nightmares, driving them to ill-considered actions; local conditions that certain pact-bound creatures would be able to take advantage of; and so on.
With her tanuki slain, the sorceress had to rely on reports from much lesser agents that did have the wit or experience to consider options her youkai trickster would have explored in detail before ever contacting her; this made her subsequent attacks clumsier and less effective than before, unless she spent power to obtain information - thus reducing what she could throw at her foes, who'd grown hardy enough by this point that anything less than her best efforts was unlikely to succeed.
The snake, meanwhile, was no less cunning or deceitful than her mammalian counterpart, but she lacked his adaptability and pragmatism. Her plans took more time - and again, more information - to properly assemble and put into play, and when those involved failed to live up to their serpentine mistress's expectations, she abandoned them to whatever fate came for them. The tanuki had not been kind to failed agents, but he at least had known better than to throw away perfectly good tools that could be turned to other purposes.
And quite aside from that, the two surviving villains were simply worried. They'd expended no small amount of power or material resources, used up valuable favors, incurred debts, drawn attention from other dangerous parties, and lost half of their quartet trying to kill, corrupt, or drive off their pursuers, and here the five Indian warriors were, still alive, still fighting strong, and still determined to bring them down.
Quite simply, the two evil females were scared and angry, and the mistakes made in their latest string of attacks showed their desperation - which only increased as the hunters drew ever closer to Hong Kong.
The settlement was much smaller then than it is today, of course, but after less than two decades of existence as a British colony, Hong Kong was well on its way to housing a population of a hundred thousand souls. Two women could have disappeared into such a crowd and made their way off the island, and in fact, based on their previous behavior, the sorceress and the snake SHOULD have fled days ago, and yet a string of attacks against the Indian party by short-lived summoned monsters made it clear their foes were still in the area, either unwilling or unable to depart.
And this is where the Quincy finally enter the story. At that time, their presence in Hong Kong was limited to a group of six who'd arrived barely a month before the hunters, posing as just another group of European merchants who'd come to investigate the trade opportunities in the region - and a couple of them WERE actually doing that, giving their kinsmen a cover to look into local spiritual activity. They'd become aware of the sorceress's activities shortly after she began acting against the incoming Indians again, and their attempts to track down and deal with the "malevolent spiritual force" darkening the young city had contributed to the poor showing against her foes by forcing the spellcaster and her remaining ally to split their efforts.
Teleportation was not one of the sorceress's particular gifts, so she could not escape Hong Kong that way, and after seeing the Quincy's spiritual awareness and skills at archery firsthand, she feared to try flying out of the city. Her attempts to get out via ship had been stymied by detection wards placed along the docks, and she'd not quite reached the point of being desperate enough to try swimming when the Indians arrived.
Sending packs of summoned monsters after her foes proved to be a mistake on the sorceress's part, as it allowed her pursuers to narrow down her location. The Quincy and the Indians soon made contact with one another, and after a very polite armed standoff and slightly halting conversation, they were able to establish a temporary alliance to hunt their shared enemy down.
The final confrontation was just two days later. After a final mob of lesser beasts and spellbound thugs was cleared out, the snake youkai was put down, her death driving the sorceress to call on her most powerful magic and bind the essence of her three slain minions to herself. This transformed her into a powerful monster called a nue, which traditionally had the body of a tanuki, the limbs of a tiger, a snake's head for a tail, and the face of a monkey - in this case, the latter was traded for the face of the sorceress, though warped and bestial.
There would later be some speculation that the nue had been the true form of the monstrous quartet all along, and that the beast had grown powerful enough to divide its form and essence so that it could spread more misery in the world. Whether that was true or not, the greater youkai was not powerful enough to withstand the combined efforts of its enemies, and was destroyed.
In the aftermath of the battle, the warrior who'd worn the Tiger's Hide considered that the animal's spirit had at last had its vengeance upon the nue. More than that, the armor had saved his life on numerous occasions, and through him, saved the lives of his allies and many others, balancing out the bad karma of the human lives it had taken in its unnatural madness. Rather than continue to wear the Tiger's Hide, he deemed it better to allow the animal's soul to rest - at least symbolically - and once the Quincy understood his intent, they offered to take the Hide back to their homeland, where it was unlikely to see use in the field again.
Having fought alongside the archers, the Indian fighter took their word as fellow warriors and handed over the armor before departing for his homeland with his friends.
The Quincy kept their promise: the Tiger's Hide was relocated to Silbern, and while it did spend some time in their labs being examined, it was never used in combat again.
Gained Tiger's Hide
Looking over your take of the loot, you are pretty well satisfied. There's a nice mix of stuff that's directly useful to you, stuff that will be useful for people you know, and stuff you could learn a thing or two from by potentially destructive study.
And this is just your initial claim; everything you didn't take will eventually be sold or traded, whether it's to one of the three gentlemen in the room or some other party via Arthur's contacts, meaning there's probably a few more items and a nice little chunk of change coming your way.
And that, again, is before you even get into the matter of all the non-magical plunder your allies grabbed.
Or the intel from all those files.
OR the potential prizes to be found when you investigate all those interesting backstories your Literary Visions turned up.
For the moment, there is one question: are you satisfied with the magic items you've opted to keep?
After some thought, you decide to revisit a couple of the storerooms and "round out" your collection with a few more pieces, mostly of the inexpensive and practical nature.
The spells bound in the various Wands that you left behind are ones you already know, so they're a bit less valuable from the educational perspective, but as far as utility goes, there's plenty of worth left in them. The only potential exception is that Wand of Bestow Curse, which - erring on the side of caution - you probably shouldn't ever use yourself, and which Briar might be reluctant to employ-
"Unless somebody really, REALLY deserves it."
-but maybe you could make a gift of it to Amy or her mother?
Gained more Wands
The Boots of Teleportation are probably going to end up as sacrificial fodder for future item-crafting. It's not that you dislike the idea of a pair of footwear that can whisk you away from danger or carry you to a distant land, you'd just prefer that the effect wasn't so limited as it in this set.
Also, that periodic rainbow shimmer is a little attention-getting and doesn't really suit your usual clothes or preferred disguises.
Gained Hong's Boots of Teleportation
The Cloaks of Resistance are also probably going to end up being used to empower a greater item, unless of course you give one or both of them away to friends.
Gained Cloaks of Resistance x2
The Ring of Fire Resistance is the first of your follow-up selections that might genuinely teach you something new, and that mainly because it IS an enchanted ring. You picked up a few others previously, of course, but both of the Rings of Protection were damaged and will need repairs, which you'd feel better about attempting AFTER you had a chance to brush up on the specific techniques of ring-crafting, and a single Ring of Invisibility might not have given you enough to work with to be confident in attempting those repairs.
Gained Goldschmidt's Ring of Minor Fire Resistance
Lastly, and by far the most expensively, there is the Gauntlet of Rust. You'll have to be careful with this one - and fortunately, there is a glove-like covering folded up neatly next to its stand that you can use to prevent the item from touching and possibly corroding metallic items you'd rather have intact - but if turns out that the Gauntlet genuinely can destroy spirit silver, that's an ability you very much want to have access to. Observing it in action enough times will help you reverse-engineer the magic, and from there...
Well, best not to get ahead of yourself.
Gained Gauntlet of Rust
There is one other item you may or may not take, but before that, you - or your Shadow - have some additional spellcasting to do.
Borrowing Ambrose's chamber once again, you set up the incense and holy water required for a Spell of Communion, hoping that the Goddesses will be able to enlighten you about the Rod of Splendor and the magus family that created and once owned it.
Shadow Alex has enough mana left to cover the costs of producing the holy water and invoking the Goddesses, so you let him handle that while you set up your Incense Burner and some of the Black Turtle brand. Looking into the box, you note that it's got two, maybe three uses of this scale left in it, and you make a mental note to either conjure more of the stuff or - if that proves unfeasible, though it isn't terribly likely - to lay in a fresh supply.
Later, though.
As you work, you discuss your options for speaking with the Goddesses with the rest of the room, putting together a list of questions that can be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." It branches a bit as a result, trying to account for possible replies that will open up or close off different lines of questioning, and the fact that you'd planned to ask after Majora's Mask as well leads to something closer to two lists.
Still, there's enough collected brainpower and experience in this room to ensure your bases are covered - though your "outfield" may still be a bit open.
Anyway, once everything is set and Shadow Alex has had a minute to gather and focus his depleted strength, he commences with the ritual.
Ten minutes later, he asks, "Is the Delgado family alive?"
And the Goddesses answer: "Yes."
"Would they like to have the Rod of Splendor returned?"
"No."
THAT is a rather unexpected answer.
You quickly back up one step along the flowchart-like list and then trace down, skipping a couple of questions that may have just been rendered irrelevant.
"Do the Delgados remember that the Rod of Splendor exists?"
"No."
Ah. That does help explain why they don't want it back; it's kind of hard to want a product of the family craft back when you aren't even aware that it existed in the first place, much less that it WAS the creation of one of your relatives.
You do have to wonder just WHY the Delgados forgot about their one-time Family Head's major work, though. That seems like the sort of thing a Magus lineage would keep more than a little information on, and not just in paper format, but within their inherited Crest as well - at least if you properly understood Ambrose and Balthazar's explanation about how the inheritance of Magecraft works. For the Delgados not to remember that the thing even exists, there would have to be NO surviving records - or at least none that the family has access to - and no living memory of said records or the Rod itself, besides.
Did you want to ask any further questions about the Rod of Splendor?
With the matter of the Rod settled, you turn to the rather more concerning matter that came to your attention - namely, the Skull Kid's Mask and the terrible power that led to its current cursed state and its presence in Earth's neck of the cosmos.
For safety's sake, your first question on this topic is: "Is Majora's Mask likely to be a threat to me or my allies?"
"No."
There are four simultaneous sighs of relief at that response, two of them tiny.
You already have one cursed Hyrulean legacy to worry about; you really don't need a second.
With the biggest concern out of the way, you ask, "Would possessing the Skull Kid's Mask attract attention?"
It may not have been one of the items you got first claim on, but you're definitely inclined to buy or trade for it, just because of where it comes from. The fewer Hyrulean relics there are floating around on Earth out of your control, the less risk there is of anyone connecting them to various elements of your magical style, the items you use or make, and some of the monsters you summon.
There is a brief pause, and then: "Only if worn in public."
...
Well, yes, it IS a creepy mask made from genuine bone; walking around wearing such a thing in plain sight WOULD tend to draw attention.
Do you have any further questions regarding the Skull Kid's Mask?
Shifting to another conditional question, you inquire, "Did the Delgados lose their records due to the act of a rival?"
It's been intimated before now that the Mages' Association is fairly competitive - not to the point where it prevents the members from working together, but enough so that they feel the need to take precautions like those Geas contracts Balthazar mentioned once when making deals between families. With that in mind, it's not impossible or even unlikely that the Delgados had some "help" in forgetting their ancestor's achievement-
"No."
-but apparently that was not the case?
There's still a few possible ways that could have happened, but you set the matter aside for now, having more pressing concerns regarding the Rod.
"If the Delgados were reminded of the Rod's existence, would they be grateful to someone who traded it to them, beyond the usual for a small family acquiring a high-end magic item?"
"No."
Huh. Are these folks just stingy, or is there something else going on? Alternately, perhaps you just made that question a little too specific...?
Shrugging, you proceed to the next inquiry. "If the Rod was returned to the Delgados, would they use it for ill purposes?"
"Possibly," the Goddesses answer promptly.
Hm. As much as certain wizards of your acquaintance have demonstrated a liking for throwing shade at Magi, this uncertain answer could just be down to human nature. The Rod of Splendor IS a fairly potent magic item, and a lot of people would be tempted to use its various methods of social empowerment - and not even always for bad reasons. Some folks could just genuinely use a bit more self-confidence or wittiness to make their lives a whole lot better without ever hurting a soul.
Of course, there are also plenty of people who'd use such improvements to make their lives better at the expense of others, sometimes specifically BECAUSE it would hurt others. For relevant examples, see Ganondorf in various incarnations, as well as Koume and Kotake, among others.
Do you have any further questions regarding the Delgado Rod of Splendor?
The implication that Majora's Mask is not lurking somewhere on or around Earth, potentially about to spring out and surprise you or any of the people you care about, is a weight off of your shoulders. ...or maybe that should be "your face"...?
Whichever is correct, that detail and the knowledge that the Skull Musk is not likely to draw special attention down on you - or at least not any more than any other cursed item made of bone would be - are enough to convince you to move on to a different topic.
With the extended series of Literary Visions still relatively fresh in your mind, you inquire after an individual from one of the many legends you heard today: "Do you know the name of the lich who recovered G'hren's Bags of Holding?"
"...yes."
That hesitant pause catches your interest, as does the fact that the Goddesses didn't try to name the creature. Before inquiring after that, however, you ask a different yet related question: "Is that lich still active?"
"No."
Ah. That suggests that the Wandenreich got him, then, which does make sense. Even the weakest lich has access to upper-mid-tier magic, whether as battle spells or extended rituals, and you know that this particular one was capable of creating its own demiplane, implying access to at least seventh-circle magic and thus putting it a cut above the average. When you combine that sort of power with the mental faculties, material resources, and wealth of experience required to get the power in the first place, as well as a lich's ability to endlessly return from the destruction of its physical body for as long as its phylactery exists, and you have the potential for a very nasty recurring bad guy.
The fact that G'hren's Bags of Holding were still in storage in Silbern, when a former owner that should have had access to the Spell of Greater Scrying could have located them, did suggest that the lich had been taken out of play on a more permanent basis. The stories of other liches whose phylacteries were destroyed by the Quincy likewise implied that, but the confirmation is good to have - if also perhaps a little disappointing, since it means this undead wizard won't have a new load of prospective plunder for you to go and grab.
Do you have further inquiries about the lich?
While there are still some unanswered questions surrounding the Delgado family, the half-dozen answers that you've obtained make it fairly clear that there's little benefit to be found in trying to sell, trade, or otherwise return the Rod of Splendor to them.
As you've used up over a third of the maximum number of questions allowed by the Spell of Communion, you decide to let this line of inquiry rest and focus on other matters.
You didn't plan this next question, but after the Goddesses' reaction, you can't NOT ask: "What was that lich's name?"
There is a pause, and then a response that is one part divine sigh, a second part divine giggle, and a third part divinely unimpressed: "Doomcaller the Gravewrought, Archmage Eternal."
...
Ambrose starts snickering.
The Briars giggle.
Balthazar sighs. "One of THOSE, huh?"
As for you... ...you restrain the urge to be clever and move on to your next question.
Moving on to a safer, saner topic, you decide to see what the Goddesses think about the deities linked to a couple of the items you picked up.
"In your opinion, would Vulcan be an acceptable deity to make deals with?"
"Unknown," comes the reply.
Maybe the Golden Goddesses haven't interacted with the God of the Forge?
You repeat the question, this time using Apollo's name. You're a little concerned that you may get the same answer-
"Yes."
-but that worry goes away at once.
You don't know all that much about how the Goddesses have been interacting with Earth's native deities, but you WERE told about that one godly party they attended a while back. Given that Apollo is supposed to count music among his divine portfolios, you could certainly see him turning up at an event like that, or even being part of the entertainment. Conversely, Vulcan doesn't have such an aspect as far as you're aware, and being the God of the Forge and conflated with Hephaestus besides, he might not be the most sociable of Powers.
While you can think of a few things you'd say in a more casual conversation, the terms of the Spell of Communion are tight enough that you don't want to risk losing your connection to the Goddesses or your remaining allotment of questions by indulging in small talk.
Besides, in all honesty, the less there is said about the chuuni tendencies of Dark Magic users, the better.
Getting back onto serious topics, you ask, "Is it possible to safely communicate with the Skull Kid that got mixed up with Majora's Mask?"
You aren't holding out a lot of hope for a positive answer here. While you're pretty sure that a typical Skull Kid doesn't count as carrying the blood of the Goddess or the soul of the Hero, this particular member of the breed was last seen fleeing for his life from a nameless menace that - based on what the Goddesses just said about you not being in any real danger from Majora's Mask - was probably a manifestation of the dying curses of the victims of the extinction-level event the cursed Mask used the Skull Kid to pull off. On top of that, there's the fact that the Skull Kid's Mask was recovered by the Wandenreich from some Hollow-like entity they killed a while back.
Between the sort of damage curses and angry undead can cause and the soul-destroying potential of Quincy powers, it is possible and even rather likely that the Skull Kid from Termina is... permanently unavailable.
"Yes," the Goddesses reply.
...and then again, maybe the little guy found one bit of good luck after having so many bad things happen to him?
Something to investigate further, later on. Right now, since you're already asking about matters related to Hyrule, you decide to stay the course. "Do you know where Ghirahim is located?"
"Yyyyes?"
The puzzled tone of the drawled response suggests that the Goddesses are confused as to why you'd think they didn't know. You can understand that, as it is a bit of a random addition to a list of questions about things you've learned today, but the presence of the Skull Kid's Mask on Earth got you thinking about other Hyrulean or Hyrule-adjacent dangers that might conceivably turn up, and the idea of the right hand (sword?) of the Demon King whose Curse screwed up your past lives and is still making problems for your current self making his way to Earth is pretty high on your List of Things I Do Not Want.
Seriously, the sword-in-harlequin's clothing was one of a handful of creatures to explicitly demonstrate that they could perceive the people sitting in the audience section of the Ring of Trials. You aren't going to bet against a full-fledged Demon Lord being able to use that information, limited as it was, to work out where the audience watching his summoned self have a not-quite-deathmatch with a Dark Lady was located, cosmologically speaking, and then stopping by to investigate.
Or even just for a rematch with Miss Akasha.
Or more likely, both.
There is another pause as the words leave your mouth, and for a moment, you wonder if you've lost the connection.
Then the Goddesses' voices come back with a, "Yes," that almost seems to... Doppler shift?
...
Did... did they just go and check on the creepy sword-demon-harlequin to make sure he was still locked up, wherever they have him stashed?
You aren't sure if the implication that the Goddesses aren't sure of their own security measures where the demon lord is concerned is more amusing, sensible, or worrying...
Regardless, you've got one question left for this session, and since you're already talking about threats from Hyrule that have turned up on Earth, you might as well cover the first one you ran into: "Have you figured out how the Curse ended up in Dark Link?"
"I've got a theory~."
And then the Spell of Communion taps out, leaving you blinking in bemusement at the last answer.
"Was Nayru... singing?" Briar asks.
"It sure sounded like it," you reply.
"...any idea why?"
"I was hoping you'd have a guess."
"I've got nothing, sorry."
"No, not your fault."
...
"How do you suppose the Powers feel about musical Communion, anyway?" you ask then.
Briar snorts. "Heck if I know."
"There are some of them who'd undoubtedly hate it," Ambrose says then, "just as there are those who'd love the idea and others that wouldn't care either way. Were you asking out of an idle curiosity, or were you planning to try speaking with your deities via the power of song the next time you performed this ritual?"
Possible atonal offenses against the Goddesses aside, is there anything else you want to do here in Wales today, before you escort Urahara back to Japan and then head home yourself?
The idea hadn't really occurred to you before Ambrose spoke up, but now that it IS in your head-
"Oh, boy."
-now, now, if she'll hear you out...
"Alex, leaving aside for a second the fact that you're only a bit above the level of carrying a tune in a bucket-"
Hey, now.
"-and that only if you're singing or playing the ocarina-"
Okay, that is more fair, and the latter approach would definitely be counterproductive when you'd be trying to ask questions. Singing your questions ought to be perfectly manageable, though.
"-are you seriously suggesting that you're going to try phrasing a bunch of questions as VERSE? Forget about rhyming, you'd never get the first one out before the spell failed!"
But if you sung quickly-
"CAN you sing that fast, though? Without making an unintelligible mush of the words?"
...
So, what she's saying is, you should brush up on your singing and your poetry, and maybe your skills with an instrument that doesn't require the use of your mouth, before you attempt to Commune with the Goddesses via music?
"...yes, Alex. Among other things."
Okay, then. You'll do that.
What instrument do you feel is best suited for this?
So, that is probably the last bit of Divination Magic you're going to perform today, and you take a moment to thank Ambrose for the loan of his spellcasting chamber.
"You're welcome, and don't worry about paying me for it," he advises. "The information was worth it."
Excellent.
Now comes the matter of renting the chamber for a bit of magic that's rather more hazardous than Divination, however powerful.
"Ah, yes," the wizard muses, elevating his recliner and then leaning forward slightly. "You DID want to try cleansing the taint from that zanpakuto, didn't you? What were you planning on using for that?"
Well, there is the approach you took to purifying your uncle's taxidermy collection last year: start with a Spell of Consecration to attune the area to the Goddesses and the cleansing power of Light Magic; and then begin channeling more Light over, under, around and through the target until either the contamination is driven out, the item falls apart, or something else happens. The ritual was the equivalent of a sixth-circle spell, and the last time you used it, your mastery of magic and your understanding of Hyrulean religious doctrine were both a lot less developed, so it should work quite a bit better this time around.
Then again, it's not just your theoretical knowledge of how to properly address and invoke the Goddesses that's changed over the last year; you've gotten much better at using your spiritual power as well, whether alone or in tandem with arcane magic. You could leverage that to enhance the ritual...
Ambrose nods as you explain the process, and then asks how you'd prefer to pay him. There's an approximate third of a hoard of relatively mundane treasure with your name on it that you could dip into to cover this, unless you'd prefer to pay out of pocket or via a favor...?
Some sort of percussion instrument seems like a natural choice for a "Musical Communion," as it would give you something to do with your hands while you were entreating the Goddesses, and praising Din has yet to steer you wrong. Of course, given how loud a good set of drums can be and how that could complicate asking questions of the Goddesses, you might need to take some precautions to keep things quiet.
At the same time, you really want to try this with a pipe organ. Working out the logistics would be a bit problematic, unless you got yourself one of the portable models or set up one of your modified Magnificent Mansions with an organ again, like you did when you were giving the Ishidas some extra rooms to house their out-of-town relatives... and now that you think about it, that might actually be a reasonable way to set up for a Spell of Communion.
A Magnificent Mansion is an extradimensional space, so it is, by definition, not actually ON the Material Plane, merely CONNECTED to it. If you went inside and shut the access portal behind you, you would no longer be in a location under the jurisdiction of the Powers That Be, and hence wouldn't be subject to their rules and regulations - at least in theory. The Powers might claim otherwise.
Even if THAT part of things turns out to be inaccurate, hopping into a Mansion and closing the door would at least keep whatever music you made from bothering or attracting the attention of anyone else in the area.
You may have to think about this some more...
"Well," you begin, "first, I was planning to have Shadow Alex cast-"
"I'm tapped out," your Dark Self advises you.
"-what, entirely?"
By way of response, he seems to relax slightly... and then sort of wavers before you, like a cloud of smoke - or in this case, shadows - in the shape of a person.
Okay, that IS pretty low on mana. Or fake mana. Shadow passing as mana? Energy, you'll just call it energy. So, you'll re-summon Shadow Alex and THEN have him cast a few enhancement spells to increase your odds of a successful cleansing, but also to improve your results when you do a more in-depth examination of the zanpakuto.
On that note, you were thinking of starting from the arcane side of things, with an Extended Spell to Analyze Dweomers so that you'll know what you're looking at before, during, and after the process. After that would be the spell Sage Elfaron used to invoke the Goddesses' inspection of your Dark Self, back during the Trials, provided you can get it to work...
"Ah," Ambrose interrupts, raising one hand. Once he's sure he's got your attention, he says, "Would that one be a spell that you've actually mastered, or would it be one of your rituals that shoves as much raw mana as possible into a semblance of a spell matrix in order to make something happen?"
"...the latter," you admit, a bit defensively. Your rituals aren't THAT crude, are they? "Although the Sage's spell was actually clerical magic, so I COULD try to replicate it with spiritual energy..."
"Have you ever attempted this ritual before? Either with mana or spiritual energy," the wizard clarifies.
You have not.
"I see. And what circle do you THINK it would be?"
He must not have been able to get a good read on what Elfaron was doing through the Ring of Trials' scrying display globe. You inform him that it felt like a ninth-tier spell, although given it WAS divine magic and you haven't quite got the hang of using spiritual power down, you'd have to cast it as tenth-level.
"Ah. In that case, I would rather you not use unstable AND untested high-tier cross-disciplinary spellcraft to call on alien deities under my roof," Ambrose admits. "My wards could handle a NORMAL tenth-circle spell, if there is such a beast, but your... enthusiastic approach to making things up as you go is a bit too likely to leak through, and we DO have one individual with near-godly perception actively looking for us."
...that's fair, you suppose.
Anyway, after poking at the spirit-sword from the arcane side, you thought you'd attempt a spiritual analysis, just to see what you can see. After that would be the actual purification, which is a sixth-circle ritual that you were thinking of cranking up to ninth-circle for maximum effectiveness, and WHY is everybody in the room suddenly looking at you like that?
"Lad," Ambrose says, "as foreign a thought as I'm sure it must be to you, throwing the maximum amount of power you can muster into a task is NOT always the optimum solution."
"Yeah, Alex," Briar chimes in. "Remember how you accidentally bleached and burned some of your uncle's collection of dead animals when you overdid things?"
Well, yes, but a zanpakuto is made of metal, it should be a lot tougher than fur and stuffing.
"Depends on the fur," Urahara notes cryptically. "Anyway, a lot of a zanpakuto's resilience is reliant on the spiritual strength of its partner Shinigami, and like I said before, this one died a long time ago. It's likely a lot more fragile than you might be expecting, and that's without considering what the corruption may have done to it."
"...I mean, I WAS planning to try and repair it afterwards..."
"There won't be anything TO try and repair if you burn the thing out of existence," Balthazar notes.
Taking the advice of your associates into account, you decide to hold back while cleansing the zanpakuto. The prospect of accidentally disintegrating what remains of Kita Yudai's blade makes the prospect a bit more palatable, as does the fact that you're already going to be effectively "doubling up" on your efforts by combining magic and spiritual power in the attempt.
Ambrose agrees to the "revised" list of spells and effects and calculates a price.
"As you have so graciously agreed not to risk breaching my wards with untested tenth-circle hybrid magic, I can lower the asking price a step, and since you don't need the room for anything LIKE an entire day, I can reduce that to an hourly rate, or a fraction of one"
"At the going rates for spellcasting services, that comes to 63 silver pieces and 75 copper on the arcane market for a single hour, or $106.25."
With that settled, you dismiss Shadow Alex once more-
"WE DIE AGAIN!" he and Shadow Briar declare in unison.
*Poof*
-and re-summon them-
*Poof*
"ONLY TO RISE ONCE MORE!"
-and get on with the buffing session. Shadow Alex cast the Spells of General Augmentation-
"BE THOU AUGMENTED!"
-Grand Destiny-
"LET THINE FATE BE A BLESSED ONE!"
"Have we ever used this spell outside of practice?" you ask your Dark Self conversationally.
"Not that I can remember," your Self answers you in the same tone.
-and once again, Sharesister.
"I MOSTLY-DIE FOR THEE, MY MA- ugh, nope, this really doesn't get any easier."
"Are you sure that's the spell, and not calling your original your master?" Shadow Briar asks.
"...a cogent point."
While Shadow Alex is making himself comfortable on the floor again due to the ongoing energy drain imposed by that last spell, you cast the Spell to Analyze Dweomers-
"LET WHAT IS SECRET BE REVEALED BEFORE MY EYES!"
-and look around at the spellcasting chamber and the people in it to see how the modest boost to your power from Sharesister has affected the spell.
As you've been doing this, Ambrose turned his hovering chair about and rode it out of the room and down the hall to the Closest of Cursed Stuff. He returns a minute later, carefully levitating the iron stand that holds Kita Yudai's zanpakuto ahead of him.
The aura that springs into being when the demon-tainted sword enters the range of your Spell to Analyze Dweomers makes you wince and lower your gold-framed ruby lens for a minute. You really don't want to look at something like that for any longer than you have to, but once the stand is in place, you take a deep breath and begin your inspection.
Demonic corruption proves to NOT get any less revolting when viewed under high-end Divination Spells. What's there is not the essence of a spell or a curse, and so not really something that Analyze Dweomer is ideally suited to investigate, but there are patterns to the murk and how it's seeped into the spiritual steel of the soul-cutting sword, the latter of which you suspect echo the construction and empowerment of the weapon like a rubbing does its original or a poured-and-set product does its mold.
Once thing you regret to learn is that Urahara's earlier statement about a zanpakuto "dying" when its wielder passes on was dead-on. Kita Yudai's zanpakuto is still a fairly mystical thing by dint of its material (or spiritual) composition, accumulated history, and FORMER power, but it retains no active abilities whatsoever, and possibly not even the potential for them to be restored - or at least not casually. In that sense, it might as well be just another ruined katana from Japan's long history.
You've got more than enough funds on your person to take care of this transaction right away, and you would really rather not owe Ambrose another favor, so why complicate things?
You reach into your pocket and fish out 63 silver coins and $1.25.
While you take your time with the arcane analysis, making sure to be as thorough as you can, the Spell to Analyze Dweomers works so quickly and completely that there really isn't much else to see. If the zanpakuto were less tainted, or if the taint in question wasn't demonic in nature, you'd spend the extra time turning the fragments of the blade over so you could get a look at how the "foreign energies" had engulfed, penetrated, and spread through the sword. Instead, you keep your hands off, walking a slow circuit around the stand and pausing to crouch a couple of times to peer more closely at the lower section of the blade.
That takes no more than a couple of minutes, and doesn't really show you anything you hadn't already seen or guessed at from the initial scan.
Lowering your lens so that the still-active spell doesn't interfere with the next form of enhanced sight you use, you fire up two further enhancement techniques to ensure that you get as much information as possible out of an untested ability. One Overloaded Brain Enhancement and one attempted Overloaded Mental-
!
-ouch!
The effort to supercharge your psychic reinforcement technique falls apart as a sensation akin to being pinched all over your body at once registers. The basic Mental Enhancement still goes through, but the extra mental energy you were trying to push into it scatters in a burst of psychic static, which kind of clings to the activated ability and irritates your everything.
Maybe you'd better not try that again... or at least not without asking a more experienced psychic how this stuff actually works.
Gained General Knowledge (Psionics) E (Plus)
Gained Mental Defense D (Plus) (Plus)
Anyway, mentally buffed and mildly stung, you begin the Necromantically focused ritual that you hope will enhance your spiritual sight.
Eight minutes later, the room actually seems a great deal DARKER than when you started, except for when you look at the other people inside of it. Their souls shine brightly- well, all of their souls except for the two Shadows, whose true nature as Illusions is perfectly apparent this way. There is spiritual energy in their makeup, or at least something that's trying very hard to pass for it, but the way that parts of their essences keep fading in and out of your spiritual sight - slipping back into a state of Elemental Shadow, however brief and localized - reveals the truth.
As for the other souls in the room, you are suddenly and keenly aware that NOBODY in this room can be considered a normal human being.
Exiled or not, Urahara is still a Shinigami, which makes his soul larger, denser, and brighter than that of anyone else here, to the point where he sort of fills that whole side of the room without actually taking up any more space than he did a moment ago. Exactly how much of that difference is due to his inherent nature as a psychopomp and how much comes from personal effort and experience, you can't be sure, but you have to squint a bit against the glare that even the gigai he's wearing can't fully conceal with this new magic active.
The zanpakuto hidden in his cane is similarly difficult to look at.
Balthazar's soul is not so overwhelming to consider, but it's not without its own anomalies. For one thing, he's a sorcerer who has shown you a few tricks, and his mastery of his power is plain to see like this, at least when he's not using Abjuration Magic to shut down sensory spells. He must be relying on Ambrose's wards for the moment...
Anyway, while the Merlinean Master has never come right out and told you his age, he doesn't exactly hide the fact that he's been around for a millennium or more at this point. His age and experience are reflected in the state of his soul, which is not nearly so massive or intense as Urahara's, but is actually more defined about its edges. You think that if you were completely blind to the physical world, you would still be able to make out Balthazar's physical features - he simply knows himself, his abilities, and his purpose that well.
While Blake doesn't have a zanpakuto, he isn't alone in your spiritual sight; a Merlin Circle hovers behind him like a halo, ribbons of spiritual energy that would normally be fluttering about - however orderly and well controlled - instead tied into the arcane sigil, which is itself linked to something so ancient and immense that it renders Balthazar's age and Urahara'a spiritual significance utterly irrelevant, something that is at once impossibly close and yet infinitely far removed.
Based on past conversations with Balthazar and Dave, you're pretty sure you're getting impressions of the universe through that, and you spare a moment to be glad your Spell of Mind Blank is in place, because that sort of impression might have been dangerous for an unprotected mind to receive.
Finally, there's Ambrose, who you know to have once been Merlin, and thus Balthazar's teacher. You would not have been surprised if the wizard's soul felt older than his onetime pupil OR if he seemed much younger, because he did come first, but he also spent a very long span of time being dead.
As it happens, Ambrose's soul seems a lot like Balthazar's, only a bit more so, suggesting that time spent dead does count towards the "spiritual age" of an entity, at least as long as the continuity of consciousness remains intact. It might be different for people who don't keep their memories from one incarnation to the next, or even for those like yourself who are somewhere in-between, able to RECALL a past life without actually BEING that life.
The issue with the wizard is that his soul is ALSO attached to something on the spiritual plane, and when you look in that "direction," all you can see is a distant golden glow... one that feels of Fae.
You abruptly recall a memory of Ganondorf's, from the very first time he rode into Hyrule as part of a Gerudo raiding party. The image that comes to mind is not one of violence, theft, or sorcery, but of the Boy-King seeing a Hyrulean field at the height of summer, completely covered with rich emerald-green grass that reached up to his knees, flowers of all colors and sizes, and a simple abundance of LIFE such as the young warlock had never imagined, despite all the stories among his tribe that spoke of it.
In that moment, Ganondorf was neither king nor warlock nor bandit; he was simply a boy, wondering at the beauty of the Land Chosen by the Gods.
...of course, right after that, he started getting ANGRY, and you quickly push the rest of the memory away before you delve too far into it.
But the question remains: what is that golden presence Ambrose is connected to? And WHY is he linked to it?
"-fifty, fifty-one-"
"And you do this sort of thing all the time?" you hear Shadow Alex ask of Balthazar and Urahara, as you're sorting out Ambrose's payment.
"Not ALL the time," Urahara replies. "It IS an occupational hazard in the retail business, but it's an infrequent one... at least in my field." He glances at Balthazar.
"It does come up more often than I'd like," the sorcerer admits. "Usually with clientele that aren't used to dealing in gold and silver, but every so often you get a customer who INSISTS on counting out exact change."
Urahara nods knowingly. "Penny-pinchers trying to squeeze very last yen, usually with coupons; kids half-excited and half-scared to be using their allowance to buy something instead of asking their parents; seniors who aren't sure of their hands or their recall, or who just want the company..."
"-fifty-six, fifty-seven-"
"And you put up with that sort of thing WITHOUT cursing people?"
"I won't say I haven't been tempted a few times," Balthazar replies. "But there are more constructive ways to address the issue."
"Pricing everything closer to the nearest ten, hundred, or thousand, to encourage customers to overpay so that you can give them a much smaller amount of change," Urahara says.
"Putting up a display of bank rolls off to one side as a quiet hint for people to sort their money on their own time," Balthazar returns.
"...you can get rolls for gold and silver coins?"
"Most banks with a hand in supernatural finance keep them in stock."
"Huh. The things you learn when you get out for a day."
"-sixty-two, and sixty-three silver pieces," you finish, before reaching back into your pocket. "And a dollar twenty-five."
Spent 63 silver pieces
Spent $1.25
"What about using a spell to count out change in a hurry?" your Shadow asks.
Balthazar shakes his head. "I never saw the need for anything so specific."
Whatever's going on with Ambrose's spiritual connections, you suspect that he would prefer not to have them discussed in company, or at least not around the Shinigami who is well-suited to investigating such things and might feel obligated to do so - or might just succumb to the siren song of Science.
Putting the distant golden glow out of your mind for the time being, you move so that you're between the three older men and the zanpakuto, so that the impressions of their respective souls don't confuse your readings. Once you're in position, you focus on the broken sword-
!
-and quickly close your eyes and look away.
"Bad, huh?" Briar asks.
"Yeeeeuuuurrrrgh," you reply.
"Are we talking Hellmouth bad?"
"Maybe," you manage. "Even on the Hellmouth, I've never seen a patch of demonic corruption that looked like... well, THAT... but then again, I've never used this spell there, either."
"And what does it look like?" Urahara wonders.
You hunt for the words for a moment. Then you give up and cast a Spell of Illusion instead, creating a Silent Image of...
"That IS nasty," Urahara admits, even though he sounds not remotely put off by the sight.
"And moving," Balthazar notes, with a similar lack of revulsion.
"Ah, the old 'grumble of maggots, writhing in a rotted carcass' impression," Ambrose sighs. "Demons have always been disgustingly good at that one."
This is normal, then?
"It's not an uncommon result when dealing with particularly severe cases of demonic taint," the wizard agrees. "Really helps you to appreciate why 'kill it with fire' is such a common response, doesn't it?"
You can definitely see the appeal.
The bad news is that the corruption is too thick for it to be limited to the surface layer of the zanpakuto; to give you the sort of impression that you just saw, the stuff must have worked its way into the structure of the broken blade and begun spreading through its interior.
The good news is that, despite the... life-like impression, the taint isn't ACTUALLY alive, nor does it have the potency necessary to engender a curse. It's "just" an unspeakable spiritual foulness that has been wearing away at the powerless husk of a dead spirit for about seven decades.
Did the Quincy seriously not notice this that entire time? Did the shielding they put up to contain the taint blind them to its spreading, or did they just not care?
Turning back to the zanpakuto, you close your eyes before you get a clear look at it again and take a few moments to focus on your breathing. You don't need this much to use your Power techniques, you're just bracing yourself for another look at one of the nastier phenomenon you've run into, which is probably going to get even nastier when you turn your golden glowing gaze upon it.
Once you feel you're prepared, you focus ki and mana towards your eyes. You were initially tempted to Overload this use of Power Sight, on the general principle that anything worth doing is worth overdoing, but that was before the experts in the room cautioned you against using a maximum power purification on the tainted zanpakuto, lest you damage the object you're hoping to purge of demonic corruption.
Most of your Power techniques aren't INTENDED to cleanse evil in that particular manner, but they have demonstrated a degree of latent potential in that area, to say nothing of their capacity for assimilating active effects on your person to further enhance themselves. You're already going to be magnifying this use of Power Sight with a largely untested high-end Necromantic ritual, as well as your ongoing Spell to Analyze Dweomers, a magical power boost, and a couple of other effects. Throwing in as much raw Power as you can on top of all of that seems like it might not be the best idea.
As you feel your eyes begin to tingle in that distinctive manner, you open them, bathing the area before you with glorious golden POWER!
"I. See. YOooooh what the heck?!"
In the moment that you look upon the sword held up by the iron stand in the middle of Ambrose's stone-walled spellcasting chamber with its arrays of metal and crystal, there is a sudden rushing noise as all of that goes away.
You suddenly find yourself in the middle of a dark void, the impression of a solid but unseen floor beneath your feet. You are able to perceive yourself as though you are illuminated from within, yet this glow does not seem to extend beyond your person, and when you look around, you see no sign of anyone or anything else.
But if you listen, you can hear something moving - chittering, squealing, and writhing - and as if your recognition of those sounds was a cue, a dull reddish-purple begins to bleed out of the blackness. At first, it's just streamers of something nasty spread out over the still-unseen floor, but as the not-light spreads, those tendrils flow to a putrescent puddle, which in turn gives way to a festering pile of gore big enough to cover the floor of your house.
The heap shifts about as THINGS move through it, unseen bodies raising indentations through the filth to the incessant sound of wet, sloppy chewing. Then there is a shudder as one of the things forces its way to the surface of the pile, revealing a length of fat, rubbery, gore-stained flesh as big as your leg, which ends in a razor-toothed maw. Said orifice gapes wide as the monstrous maggot-like thing points in your direction with a high-pitched yet menacing shriek.
At that cry, several more of the revolting forms begin to emerge from the pile, each as disgusting as the last and all of them locked on to your presence.
"BACK, UNCLEAN THING!"
The taint-maggots recoil, shrieking in alarm, as you release more of your Power in the form of an Aura. You don't go so far as to actively channel the roiling golden energy towards the manifestation of corruption, because you're just trying to ward the stuff off so you can keep gathering information about this... thing... and mixing your energies in with its could throw that off.
Plus, you might start purifying it, which you'd prefer to do in a more controlled manner if possible.
The burst of energy spreads out to a distance of perhaps thirty feet, a visible wave of light that nonetheless fails to illuminate the darkness that surrounds you.
As you wait for your Power to stabilize in its current configuration so you can perform another technique, you notice that the animated concentration of unholy essence before you isn't just drawing back out of surprise or fear - or whatever it has the capacity to feel - but because the uppermost layer of that pile of gore and the surrounding puddle both rippled when the wave of Power passed over it. As you watch, the nearest edge of the body of discolored liquid slowly starts to bubble and darken, while the greater festering mass almost seems to be trying to lean away from you.
The wormlike entities are just getting over their shock and starting to eel towards you when you engage your Power Armor-
"I am a champion of the Golden Power, wielder of the Flame of Din!"
-causing another squealing flinch. The reaction is less pronounced than its predecessor, which is likely due to the fact that your Armor is a much more self-contained technique than your Aura, but you aren't sure whether the maggots have the mental capacity to have recognized that fact - or even just to get over the shock of encountering your Power for the first time - or if their quicker recovery was down entirely to instinct.
To wit: demonic essence encounters burning godly light, demonic essence recoils from burning godly light; demonic essence encounters LESS burning godly light, demonic essence recoils a shorter distance.
"What do you think, Bria-aaaand she's not here," you belatedly realize.
As you're adjusting to your partner's absence, the corruption-worms begin to creep in your general direction, more and more of their putrid lengths pulling free of the heap. The ongoing glow of your Power clearly makes them uneasy, but by itself it's not enough to deter or harm them. Though that might change if you let one of them hit the thin field of gold clinging to your skin and clothing... or maybe not.
Aside from the adverse reaction to your manifest Power and the fact that they're bigger than you first saw, you haven't noticed anything new about the ugly quasi-creatures slithering out of the mass of corruption.
You're in the middle of a vision that was triggered via a mix of magic, spiritual energy, and your unique Power. By the feel of things, you're currently on (or seeing) the Spiritual Plane, so using spiritual power feels like the proper thing, and since you would much prefer NOT to have to lay your hands on the thing(s) you're seeing, spiritual projectiles are definitely the way to go.
In light of the number of targets involved, you ready a quick burst of Spirit Shots and take aim at the nearest of the maggots, hoping that the relative closeness of the thing will prevent it from dodging and maximize the effectiveness of your attack.
White, red, and golden energy swirls about your extended fingers and coalesces into blazing inch-wide spheres at the tips!
Is... is that supposed to-?
The Spirit Shots fly, leaving several scorch marks along the flanks of and blasting several holes right through the oncoming parasite, which reels from the hits, screaming in agony. The other maggot-incarnations recoil with shrieks of their own, a couple of the ones that were flanking or following the leader taking hits of their own - some just glancing, others weakened after punching through the first grotesque being.
As the burnt and punctured body of the first worm collapses and... you hesitate to use the word "bleeds," because even leaving aside its off-yellow, that substance oozing sluggishly out of its wounds seems too thick to be proper blood. Regardless, as the bloated corpse LEAKS atop the pile of gore, you spare a second to look down at your fingertips. The golden light of your Power Aura and the underlying, denser "flame" of your Power Armor are still there - though is it your imagination, or do they seem a bit paler? - and while the stuff you just fired off was definitely wrapped in a layer of the golden energy, it seemed to mostly be made of purer spiritual energy.
How did THAT happen?
Screeching draws your gaze back to the matter at hand, as the maggot-things surge forward as fast as their fat, rubbery forms will allow - which really isn't anything to be worried about. Even without the benefits of Body Flicker or a Haste Spell, you're able to backpedal faster than the avatars of corruption can advance, which gives you plenty of room and time to take aim with another round of Spirit Shots-
*Screech!*
-whose gold-limned volley claims two more victims in short order.
The remaining maggots writhe and wriggle faster, trying to close with you before you can get off any more attacks.
They fail miserably. As horrific as they appear to be, the things are just so weak and stupid that fighting them isn't a contest, and barely even constitutes a chore-
*Skree!*
-okay, scratch that, you think, glancing from the latest batch of casualties to where new maggots have crawled out of the pile-
*Chomp*
*Crunch*
*Riiiip*
*Slop*
-only to fall on the nearest bodies of their dead or dying kin and begin to feed with disgusting relish.
Ugh. Definitely a chore, now, and not a remotely pleasant one. As the last of the initial wave of demonic vermin fall to your Spirit Shots, you consider your next move - and also take another look at your two active Power techniques, which have definitely dimmed after four volleys of spiritual energy passed through and soaked up some of their substance.
The heck is going on with that...?
With all of the first wave of demonic creatures dead or dying, you refrain from unleashing another round of fire and give the new, opportunistically cannibalistic maggots emerging from the mound of gore a slightly wider berth.
As they feed on their fallen, a thought occurs, and you weave a Spell of Tongues.
"Can you understand me?" you call.
Part of you wonders in passing exactly what language you were speaking just now, or trying to.
Regardless, three of the maggots - there are seven, no, make that eight of them, now - stop in their scavenging and turn about to screech at you, maws opening wide enough to bare blood-dripping fangs and let half-eaten bits of meat dangle and slop to the ground. Two more of the giant vermin, which are farther away from your position, seem to turn towards their hissing neighbors in confusion, but that quickly fades as they take advantage of the sudden reduction of competitors to feed faster.
The other three worms, farthest of all, ignore your statement entirely.
"Lan-gu-age," you try again, enunciating slowly and clearly. "Do. You. Speak. It?"
There is more hissing and some trying-to-be-menacing posturing, but these maggots are smaller, thinner, and more frail-looking than their predecessors, which you already found pathetically easy to kill, and without that initial shock of revulsion, their appearance is... okay, no, it's still absolutely revolting, it's just not a surprise anymore.
All in all, very unthreatening to anything except a steady stomach and personal cleanliness.
Also, the sounds and movements they're making aren't getting translated by your Spell of Tongues. That's not an ABSOLUTE indicator that the worm-things are unintelligent or that they're not utilizing SOME form of communication, but if they are, it's exotic or primitive enough that it's just not registering.
"...what the heck, I'll take that as a squeal of hostility," you mutter, before focusing your spiritual power once more, and proceeding to rain Power-boosted Spirit Shots at the new set of targets.
There is much wailing and thrashing and burning of flesh while too-thick yellow fluid spatters around, and the glow of your Power techniques dims further, but by the end of it, you're alone in the darkness with over a dozen dead or dying fat demonic worms-
*Shhhhluck*
-and maybe a few more still lurking the mound, though whether that's because of fear, laziness, or some other reason, you honestly have no idea. You wait a bit to see if they're going to emerge, but they stay put, the only indication of their presence the occasional obscene slurping or muffled squeal.
The Power-induced vision wavers about you. These things don't normally last long, and you've been here for a comparatively long time.
Is there anything else you want to attempt here?
You'd like to have a better idea of how many of those maggot-things are still crawling around inside the rotten heap of pseudo-flesh, and the idea of tagging them with spiritual energy to make them stand out against the inert mass surrounding them occurs to you. However, you haven't worked out how to non-violently mark things with spiritual energy yet, or at least not at range and through cover; you can do it easily enough with objects that you're touching, but-
*Shhhhluck*
*Scree*
-yeah, no, you're not putting your hands on or in that.
You also aren't sure if you have time to fumble around with a completely new technique, but after a moment, you realize there's no need to, because you already know how to try and find demonic energy signatures through local interference and even around or through solid objects.
Squinting at the pile of gore, you focus your Corruption Sense and try to scan through the mass of offal.
...
*Scree*
*Scree*
*Shhhhlop*
Ugh. You're really rather relieved that this technique is non-visual, at least when you're trying to sense around corners and past opaque barriers like this, because just hearing the noises and feeling the presence of that festering pile of filth is quite unsettling enough.
Gained Corruption Sense B (Plus) (Plus)
By your count, there are still four of the maggot-things lurking in the mass. You have no idea what that translates to in real-world terms, but there were six in the first wave, eight in the second, and now these survivors hiding out in the pile, giving you a total of eighteen active vectors for the corruption in and upon Kita Yudai's zanpakuto.
So you basically wiped out seven-ninths of the taint's... something?
You definitely need to consult with the others about this, especially Urahara. There is just way too much that you still don't know about spiritual corruption in general and how it applies to zanpakuto in particular.
That thought seems to provoke a response, as your vision starts to darken at the edges and stretch out before you.
"Uh, wait, no, there was still something-!" You wanted to test one more thing, and you fumble to focus your Power AND find a Word in time. "Uh, extend! Wait, I mean" - you push the dancing energy to your throat, taking a quick breath that tastes of Power - "EXTEND!"
And then, with a flare of gold, the vision ends.
Okay, so THAT didn't remotely do what you wanted to.
"Uh, Alex?" Briar asks, as Ambrose's spellcasting chamber reappears around you.
"Yes, partner?"
"Why are you breathing gold?"
Indeed, there is a thin mist of sparkling gold billowing out of your mouth and nostrils.
That's new.
You trying breathing more forcefully, blowing, and clearing your throat a couple of times, but the energized exhalations don't seem to do anything except tingle, the way Power usually does, and they quickly fade away.
Gained Power Breath F (Plus)
A bit disappointing, but hey, at least you didn't burn your throat by respiring supernatural energy again!
"So!" Ambrose says brightly. "What the hell was that all about?"
As you explain what you just went through-
"Maggots? Really?"
Why does Urahara sound so delighted by this information?
"You came face to facelessness with some overgrown demonic parasites, and your second instinct was to try TALKING to them?"
It seemed like a good idea at the time?
-you dismiss what's left of your Power techniques, noting in passing that the spells and other enhancements you had in place have, as usual, been seriously worn down. That Necromantic ritual is gone entirely, which you think might be a result of its nature as an effect you forced into being, lacking the practiced control, defined structure, and according stability of a properly developed spell.
Anyway, aside from asking the experts if they have any idea what was up with those fat, wormy masses of corruption, do you have any specific questions about what your vision showed?
Once you've finished recounting your experience in all its disgusting glory, you ask, "What did it look like on the outside?"
"Eh," Ambrose says with a shrug. "You looked at the sword; you started gaping blankly in its general direction with what I would normally call the Thousand-Yard Stare, but which was obviously more looking INTO the weapon rather than PAST it; and then you glowed gold for a split-second before you snapped out of it with your odd case of halitosis."
Only a split-second, huh? Well, that tallies with your past experience of Power visions. You hadn't been sure before this if the time-compression involved with them was merely a consequence of most of them coming about in the middle of combat situations, where you know - spiritually as well as mentally - that freezing up for even a second or two in reality would get you clobbered. For all that you were dealing with potentially dangerous demonic corruption, this situation was fairly different, and the different state of mind you were in as a result could have altered how the vision worked.
"And to the supernatural senses?" you inquire.
"Nothing I hadn't seen before," the wizard replies.
"Likewise," Balthazar replies.
"It confirmed a theory," Urahara replies, still sounding very pleased.
That may be the least startled reaction anybody's ever had to their first encounter with your Power... and on that note, you glance at Briar.
"How did he REALLY take it?"
"About like that, actually," your partner admits, gesturing at the Shinigami. "Just with more surprise."
Huh. Is that a point for the resilience of the scientific mindset, or is it just that you previously blew Urahara's mind when you let him scan your soul and he found a few divine constructs stashed away inside of it, meaning this later encounter with Power just isn't as much of a shock?
"A little of both, I think," the shopkeeper admits. "Although on that note, do you use those Heart Containers to generate this Power, or is it something you can do without them?"
It's the latter; you actually won your very first Heart Container in the battle where you used Power for the first time, employing a Power Ball as the killing blow against the Malicious Cephalopod, Arrogante.
Do you want to admit that to Urahara, though?
"So," you say then, "what are your thoughts about me inducing another Power vision and then baiting out the remaining maggots? And if you think it's a good idea, what should I use as the bait?"
"I would say that we should check to see what effect, if any, your escapades have already had on the sword before making that decision," Ambrose says.
He has a good point. Fortunately, most of your analytical spells and effects are still going, so you turn about, flip your ruby eyepiece back into place, and give the zanpakuto another scan.
The taint clinging to the blade is noticeably thinner in places and distinctly burnt, all of that on the side that was facing you. Most of those patterns that you noticed in the corruption during your first scan have also been disrupted, and this "damage" isn't limited to just one side of the tainted weapon; it also extends around to the reverse side, and may well penetrate deeper into the remaining material besides. Aside from that, however, the broken blade doesn't look any different through your arcane eyepiece.
When you report this, Ambrose strokes his beard thoughtfully. "Hm... well, if the effects were so limited, I suppose an unorthodox method of purification might not be a terrible idea..."
"One problem, Alex," Briar points out. "You've never had two of those visions from the same subject before, have you?"
You think back.
...
No, you don't think you have.
While you do give a moment's thought to omitting the details, you don't really see a point in doing so. As such, you explain to Urahara about how your first trip to Hawaii led to your first life-or-death battle, and how you struck a finishing blow with a Power Ball and got awarded your very first Heart Container for the win.
Urahara takes all that in with a few nods, and then asks, "Out of curiosity, which of the Containers you're using is that one?"
"It's not one of them, actually," you reply. "I decided to sacrifice that Heart Container to Din to commemorate the victory."
Ambrose and Balthazar perk up at that.
"What sort of sacrifice are we talking about here?" the Merlinean Master inquires.
"I took a guided tour of Kilauea with my Dad on the way back from the World Tournament," you reply. "As the Goddess of Earth and Fire - among other things - Din has connections to volcanoes, and the PLAN was to teleport back to Kilauea that night and very ceremonially and respectfully toss the Heart Container into the lava, after making another sacrifice to appease the local goddess about my borrowing her fire-mountain."
All three men nod in approval and/or agreement.
"What went wrong?" Ambrose asks.
"The giant squid had a master," you begin.
"Of course it did," Balthazar sighs.
You recount your first, brief encounter with the Evil Hawaiian Sorcerer, up to and including how you and Lu-sensei combined efforts to throw him and his Fireball off your apartment's balcony, and follow that up with your much later run-in with his monkey familiar and its attempt to nab Briar. Finally, you cover your encounter and battle with the sorcerer and his next summoned beast, Searfang, inside the volcano, and how you called up Bando the Celestial Goron to tag-team the pair, winning another Heart Container in the process.
As for the fate of the Hawaiian Sorcerer...
"Wait, what do you mean, 'I don't know what happened to him after that'?" Ambrose demands.
"I mean, he didn't seem important enough to worry about?" you reply with a shrug. "The guy had the better part of three weeks to scry my location and teleport to me, call up a demon to hunt me down, or do SOMETHING vengeful while I was in Japan, and he didn't. Considering the effort he must have gone to in setting up that trap on Kilauea, it clearly wasn't a lack of DESIRE for revenge that kept him from acting, which leaves lack of ABILITY - and if he couldn't reach me in Japan when he was in Hawaii, reaching me when I was back in California didn't seem much more likely."
Granted, California is only about three-fifths as far from Hawaii as Japan is, but it's still well over two thousand miles away, a distance that your average spell-slinger just isn't going to be able to cross or reach across under their own power. The Hawaiian Sorcerer's performance didn't give you the impression that he was above-average, just very well-established locally, which was another point against him coming after you in person.
Sorcerers who've claimed a specific territory often don't like to leave that territory: sometimes it's because they have competitors who would try to move in and take over if their absence became known or even sufficiently suspected; and at other times, it's because the sorcerer is mystically tied to the location - or to some entity residing within it - and would lose a chunk of power while outside of their chosen domain.
Whatever the case is with the Hawaiian Sorcerer, you've not seen hide nor hair of him since his monkey familiar teleported him out at the moment your slaying spell connected, which has made you think he either didn't survive that spell or was sufficiently spooked by it to abandon further thoughts of revenge.
"Lad," Ambrose sighs, "you're basically saying that you left a mortal enemy to an uncertain death after a confrontation in the mouth of an active volcano. Forget the 'Evil Overlord' impression, that's the kind of move that has 'James Bond Villain' written all over it."
"YOU didn't, no," Ambrose replies without missing a beat, "but didn't you just say he'd set a trap for YOU? One that, had you not called in reinforcements of your own, would probably have involved him sitting back and laughing while you fought a giant lava lizard, or could even have seen him teleporting away and leaving you to be cooked and eaten? Or eaten and cooked, whichever came first?"
...
"Okay," you admit, "maybe the thematic similarity was stronger than I thought."
The wizard nods.
"And if it will make you feel better," you go on, "I can try scrying for the guy. Like I said, though, the last I saw of him, most of his bones were cracked or broken, he was bleeding from the mouth, and he'd taken a death spell just as his monkey teleported them both away."
"Decent odds he's dead," Balthazar agrees, "but it's always best to be sure with guys like that."
Fair. You start to focus your mana... and then stop and turn to Ambrose. "Is my tab going to cover this, or...?"
"I'm curious to know who this fellow is," Ambrose says. "Factor in the heads-up about a potential problem the next time I go to Hawaii, or the absence thereof, and you're good."
Great.
For all your habit of grabbing loot from fallen enemies, you don't have any objects metaphysically linked to the Hawaiian Sorcerer. The Heart of Fire comes the closest, and even then, it's not close enough to count. But that's fine; having fought the man twice, you have more than enough of a connection to him for the Spell of Scrying to follow. The lack of a focus makes it a bit more likely for the target of the spell to successfully throw off your attempt to find him, but you can largely counter that by using the Greater version of Scrying, which will also save you an hour's time spent casting the magic - and then, since you aren't going to need several hours to watch the Hawaiian Sorcerer no matter WHAT state he's in, you can cut down on the duration and then spend the freed-up power and a little extra besides using the Heighten Spell Metamagic for further assurance.
"I spy, with my little scry..." you mutter, as you conclude the spell.
A scrying globe appears before you, showing-
"Something very dark," Briar finishes.
-that. The room is quite dim, but for the light of a new dawn peeking around the drapes pulled over the window. Snoring emanates from a rectangular shape that you're assuming is the bed, and you find yourself frowning at the noise, because something about it doesn't sound right.
Shadow Alex quickly spots you a Spell of Keen Senses, which feeds into the Scrying Spell and causes the darkness within the sphere to recede, revealing-
"A monkey?" you blurt out.
"The monkey!" Briar says at the same moment.
"THE monkey?" Ambrose says slowly.
Indeed, sprawled out in a bed sized for a human, and thus practically swallowed by the mattress, is a primate that is either the Hawaiian Sorcerer's familiar or alike enough to it that you can't tell the difference. The monkey seems to be a restless sleeper, because the blankets have been kicked around enough for you to see some of the animal's legs - as well as the loose Hawaiian-print pajama bottoms that cover them.
There is no one else in the room; your spell is locked onto the monkey.
...
...
Though the image before you is a harmless one on its own, when taken in context with your previous encounters with the Hawaiian Sorcerer - especially the last one, which ended with him quite possibly literally dead on his feet and with only his monkey to aid him, that you knew of - it gives you a nasty suspicion.
To try and verify that, you activate your Spiritual Sight and peer through the Scrying globe, taking in the spiritual aura of the being sleeping in the bed.
...
You are no expert on the shape of other primates' souls, and you didn't have the time or the thought to examine the familiar's spiritual signature the two times that you met it, but what you're seeing now doesn't look like the soul of an animal. It's too large and complicated, with aspects that are almost human - but only ALMOST.
You've seen a LOT of human souls at this point, young and old, pure and corrupt, basically good to very much Evil, and many, many points in between those various extremes, and the spirit you're looking at now doesn't truly map to any of them. Even the parts that are close to human are still recognizably... other. A lot of the formation and color still resembles what you'd expect to see in an animal - albeit not the dog, horse, or bat that you have the most exposure to - just much more developed.
You honestly have no idea what you're looking at here, and so, once again, you turn to the others in the room, describing what you're seeing and then asking for their opinions.
Urahara frowns and narrows his gaze at the image before you, spiritual energy reaching out.
Your conjured globe shudders slightly, image going fuzzy for a moment, but then it clears up.
Ambrose curses at not having the right spells for this sort of thing prepared, before Balthazar reaches out and taps the side of his head, having already done so for himself. They then join Urahara in looking through your Spell of Scrying at the pajama-wearing monkey.
The little primate shudders in its sleep, possibly sensing all the attention, but doesn't wake. At least, not yet.
"It's not a possession," Urahara reports after a moment, "or at least not a successful one. There's only the one soul, and it fits that body too well not to belong to the original owner."
"Could it be the result of a failed possession?" Balthazar suggests.
"Maybe." Urahara glances at you. "You said that you met this monkey a year ago?"
A year and change at this point, yes.
"Long enough that most spiritual trauma either would have killed the victim by now or healed over without trace, then," the Shinigami says. "Or at least any traces detectable this casually."
Nobody seems to have a solid answer, so you decide to contact another expert.
"Ambrose, I'm going to cast another spell to try and get some answers, if that's okay."
"As long as you share said answers," the wizard replies.
You nod and commence the Spell to Know the Enemy. The full minute that it takes to complete the spell eats up most of the remaining duration of your greatly-shortened Spell of Scrying, but the picture-globe is still there before you when you pose your inquiry to Nayru and receive an answer.
You may not believe this, but...
"...huh," you state aloud, before repeating what the Goddess just told you. "Okay, so, apparently, the Hawaiian Sorcerer DID die after I fought him, and he DID possess his monkey in the aftermath - but it was with the monkey's full agreement, and it was only until they were able to call in a couple of favors with a local druid."
"Ah," Ambrose says. "Arranged for his own Reincarnation, did he?"
"What," Urahara says flatly.
"Druids have access to rituals that allow a soul to maintain continuity of self between two incarnations," the wizard answers, before you have a chance to. "Some of these rituals create a new body on the spot, while others exploit the soul's somewhat loose relationship with Time to arrange for the dead person to have been reborn a couple of decades earlier and gradually remember their previous lives as they grow up." He looks at you. "Any idea which version this sorcerer got?"
"Neither," you reply. "Evidently he didn't have THAT much credit with the druid, so he got a more... natural sort of reincarnation."
...
"...the druid arranged for him to come back as a newborn?" Ambrose guesses.
You nod.
"...excuse me a moment."
And then the wizard throws back his head and laughs.
Ambrose's amusement proves at least mildly infectious, and you allow yourself a few chuckles, because the Hawaiian Sorcerer's situation IS kind of amusing, especially from your perspective as someone who's dealt - and is still dealing - with a similar situation.
You hope that the Sorcerer will use this opportunity to make better life-choices than he did the first time around.
"Leaving aside my professional concerns about resurrection magic," Urahara begins.
"Reincarnation, not resurrection," Briar advises him. "Small but important difference."
"...noted," the Shinigami says with a nod. "But leaving that aside for the moment, if the scrying spell was supposed to locate this sorcerer, how did it end up locking onto his monkey? I mean, if the sorcerer has been reincarnated as a baby, shouldn't it have gone after that baby?"
"That depends," Balthazar replies. "If the sorcerer hasn't been reborn yet, or if they don't remember their past life yet, a Spell of Scrying could very easily go awry."
The first possibility strikes you as fairly unlikely. It's been over a year since the Hawaiian Sorcerer died, and while you don't know how to cast the Spell of Reincarnation yourself - at least not yet - you are aware from conversations with Briar and your other instructors that "entry-level" revival magic like that and the Spell to Raise the Dead impose distinct time limits on their use. If you don't get the corpse to a capable caster within the established limit, the spells simply won't work, so the druid that reincarnated the Hawaiian Sorcerer couldn't have waited very long to do so.
"No more than a week after death," Briar confirms.
Right, and given that human pregnancies last nine months on average-
"Ten at the outside," Ambrose chimes in.
"...why do you know that?" you ask.
"Partly as random trivia picked up in my studies or via idle conversation," the wizard replies, "but mostly because I have lived through several Lucia-Grade Baby Crazes."
...Mrs. Drake got a little scary when she was expecting, did she?
"And when her sister-in-law was expecting," Ambrose sighs. "AND when the wives of Arthur's friends were expecting."
...
Altria and Anna are going to have a time of it when they get around to having kids, aren't they?
"Oh, yes."
-anyway, given the numbers involved, the Baby Formerly Known as the Hawaiian Sorcerer should have been born by now. Unless there was some kind of delay in the afterlife that held the soul up, but if THAT were the case, your Spell of Scrying probably would have locked on to the sorcerer's soul in the hereafter.
So, it's much more likely that the soul HAS been reborn, and just doesn't currently remember who they used to be. Combined with the complete change of physical identity, that interruption in the continuity of self would throw off scrying attempts.
As for why you got the Monkey, instead, that's down to three factors, one of them being the fact that the Monkey WAS the Sorcerer's familiar and still retains a degree of connection to its now-former master, and the second being that you'd actually encountered the Monkey yourself and personally associated it with the Sorcerer, which would incline your magic to treat them as linked, if not the same.
The third reason is part of what Nayru just told you. To wit:
"As much as the Hawaiian Sorcerer didn't want to die, his Monkey didn't want to lose the intelligence boost that came with being a familiar," you explain. "Say what you will about the guy - and I can say a few things - he looked after his familiar, and one of the arrangements he'd made with that druid was to have the Ritual of Awakening performed on the Monkey. The druid used the Sorcerer's soul as a template for the magic, effectively copying a portion of his knowledge to the Monkey's expanded mind, similar to how the familiar bond had originally let them share information."
"...Alex," Briar says slowly. "Are you telling me that dung-tossing knuckle-dragger is now a SORCERER?"
Do you have any other questions on this matter that you'd like to (have Shadow Alex) divine answers for, or to ask of your physically present audience?
"Not MUCH of one, yet, but he's working on it."
Spiritual Sight isn't ideal for trying to rate untapped potential or developed ability in the various fields of magic, but since most styles involve channeling power about or through one's soul, telling whether or not a person has the ability at ALL is doable - and the Monkey does bear the telltales, although from what you can see through this sensory mode, you wouldn't rate him very highly even by normal standards. Second-circle at best, and that only with power-boosting rituals.
Switching over to Mage Sight for a moment, you get a much better set of readings, and yeah, second-circle is being generous. That said, going from "sorcerer's animal familiar" to "Animal Sorcerer of the First Circle" in a year's time IS an achievement worthy of note, even if the Monkey did get a lot of help with that Awakening Spell.
"I suppose I'll have to call him the Monkey Sorcerer from now on," you muse, while taking a final look about the room. You don't see any cages, perches, or small animal beds, which leaves you wondering if the sapient simian spellcaster has a familiar of his own or not.
Your shortened Scrying Spell runs out before you can poke around further.
All things considered, you're willing to give the Monkey Sorcerer and his reincarnated former master a pass. You'll still keep your mundane and mystical eyes open the next time you're in Hawaii, of course, but neither of them pose a real threat to you and yours at this point.
The Monkey got the drop on Briar last time because she had no reason to suspect he'd be hostile (at first), he had a familiar's physical and spiritual enhancement to help him resist her magic, and he was simply a lot bigger. Your partner is aware of the danger now, the Monkey Sorcerer is less resilient on his own than he was with his master's power backing him up, and if he tries to grab Briar again, your own cleansed, stabilized, and augmented familiar bond means that she can just take on human size and kick his furry butt.
On a related note, Lu-sensei was kicking the Hawaiian Sorcerer's flower-printed backside all over your suite. The Monkey Sorcerer will NOT be an issue for him, although a quick heads-up might not go amiss.
The Hawaiian Sorcerer never even SAW Cordy, to the best of your knowledge, and if he did happen to scry her and tell his familiar what she looked like, you'd give the Chase heiress pretty good odds against the Monkey Sorcerer right now. Again, informing her of the potential threat before she ends up back in Hawaii would only be the decent thing to do.
The only other member of your social circle that the Sorcerous Hawaiian Duo would have any reason at all to connect to you is your Dad, and Hawaii isn't exactly on his travel itinerary. That may change in the future, and if so, you'll deal with it, but for right now, it's hardly a pressing matter.
With all of that out of the way, you decide to get on with that attempt at invoking another Power vision and cleaning out the remaining taint-worms. Thanks to Briar's inquiry about whether or not you even CAN get multiple visions off of a single person, you've recalled that your earlier matches with Kahlua and Altria DID actually start to induce secondary visions - they were just a great deal less pronounced than the first, allowing you to hold them back to avoid interruption to those fights. On top of that, while your understanding and control of your Power are still limited in absolute terms, they've grown considerably since you first threw a Power Ball at Arrogante, making it easier for you to restrain those visionary "echoes" - something you quickly got into the habit of doing, and have kept up for long enough that you were starting to forget the alternative was even possible.
So, refocusing your attention on the corruption-clad zanpakuto, you gather your dwindling mana in one hand and still-abundant ki in the other, push them towards your eyes, and then LOOK-
Gained Power Vision E (Plus)
-and you're back in that dark place with the worm-ridden heap of gore.
Well, that was easy!
Curiously, there is no sign of the "dead" demon-maggots, nor are the "living" ones visible, although you can hear them squealing and chewing their way through the pile of flesh.
How will you approach this? Power Aura didn't seem to work at drawing the survivors out the last time, and you're getting quite low on mana - and thus Power - besides, so maybe...
This seems like a reasonable approach, and after making sure there aren't any maggot-things lurking in the dark around or behind you - thank you, Corruption Sense - you start relaxing some of the restraints you normally keep on your personal power, specifically the ones that keep your presence and impact upon the Spiritual Plane down to "reasonably human" levels.
You don't have Ichigo's ridiculous level of innate spiritual power, but multiple lifetimes' worth of life (and death) experience would ensure that you were no slouch in this field even if every one of your prior incarnations had been humble villagers with the fate and fortune to lead perfectly ordinary, entirely boring lives.
On a side note, the image of Ganondorf, King of Pig Farmers, is kind of amusing.
In any case, as your Spiritual Concealment relaxes and more of your essential "you"-ness starts to leak into the atmosphere of the vision-space, your spiritual senses start to get a bit dimmed. This does not prevent you from sensing the shift in activity within the rotting mound-
*Squee*
*Crunch*
*Slop*
-and so you are almost the furthest thing from caught off-guard when a couple of the oversized maggots emerge.
You use the word "almost" in there because this "third wave" of the creatures embodying the corruption of Kita Yudai's zanpakuto are significantly larger than you were expecting them to be, closer to the size of the original half-dozen monsters than the second group that followed and tried to cannibalize them.
This might explain the absence of the "corpses" on your return...
You'd be more worried about that if these things didn't feel just as weak as their counterparts did. It would seem that properly absorbing all the corruption represented by those corpses either takes time, isn't terribly efficient, or both.
You previously estimated that there were four of the worm-things still lurking in the pile, two of them have just emerged to (laughably) menace you, and you can see a third following them out. The last, however, seems content to remain within its nest, taking advantage of the absence of competitors to feed on whatever in there it finds worth consuming.
What will you do?
With your mana reserves as low as they are, you'd prefer to avoid using Power - or spells, for that matter - as much as possible, and while you'd prefer to make a clean sweep of these maggots, the idea of running away from these three while you wait for the last one to haul itself out of that disgusting mess seems... undignified.
Seriously, even all eighteen of these things together wouldn't have been what you'd consider a threat to your person, much less the kind of threat that would actually pose a danger to you without you screwing up and giving them a golden opportunity. Or maybe if they'd fused into a single giant taint-worm...
Putting aside theoretical threats that will never be, you focus on getting rid of the unwanted demonic presence that is, readying a fresh barrage of Spirit Shots. Although the maggot-things have proven themselves to be fragile enough that you suspect even this relatively light attack form could finish them off without much trouble, you'd like to be done with them as quickly as is practical, and so to make up for the impact force and purification element that an infusion of Power provided, you Overload the technique with more spiritual energy.
*Scree!*
*Wriggle*
The annelid avatars of taint crawl faster, as if the orbs of intensified energy hovering at your fingertips were a buffet that had just declared an all-you-can-eat special. That comparison isn't an exaggeration on your part, by the way - the things are literally DROOLING as they writhe towards you, maws opened wide in anticipation.
You can't resist the opening, and you take it without hesitation, doing your best to aim your Spirit Shots right down the throats of your oncoming foes.
Trying to coordinate six shots between three different moving targets takes a bit of work, particularly when you're dealing with projectiles that don't have the built-in targeting parameters of a spell to help guide them, but a lot of your (slightly) superior experience with Ki Shots is applicable. As such-
*Pew*
*Zap!*
*Splort!*
*Skreeee!*
Gained Spirit Shot E (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
Gained Spiritual Overload D
-you sink three Overloaded Spirit Shots straight into two of those oncoming maws, and then clear out the back of the wormy "heads" they're attached to. Two more Shots land somewhat off-target, bull's ears to the eyes, brows, noses, and/or cheekbones of the previous batch, and the sixth and last projectile just grazes past the worm on the far left.
This still leaves two of the maggots of corruption dead on the dark floor of this vision - one thrashing and squealing in mortal agony, the other just twitching - while the third recoils from the comparatively less deadly hits, shrieking and shedding that too-thick yellow blood.
Between your strong soul and the extra charge of the Overload, you have enough spirit energy left to form one more normal-strength Shot, which you do at the tip of your index finger, aiming your hand at the surviving worm like it's a gun.
With that lot dealt with, you look back to the pile of carrion at the center of the vision. The last of the maggots is still hiding inside the heap, and the deaths of its few remaining compatriots have caused it to go very still and quiet.
You aren't sure what to do at this point. The maggot is clearly not coming out of its own free will, or whatever it's got, and you don't want to go digging into or through that disgusting blob of rot, as much for fear of doing further damage to the already broken and heavily tainted zanpakuto it represents as because of how revolting the idea of touching or otherwise directly interacting with that mess is.
You've heard a line that feels appropriate, and you paraphrase it now: "Do you feel lucky, punk?"
The maggot shrieks at you, spitting up bloody drool.
*Ba-ZAP!*
...huh. That last Shot felt a little more potent than you were expecting.
Regardless, that is that.
Recalling the opportunistic cannibalism exhibited by the previous scavengers, you resume suppressing your spiritual pressure and back as far away from the pile of rot as you can - at least until the vision starts to waver around you, which you take as a sign to take a step or two back in the other direction to keep yourself from shifting back to normal awareness.
Your hope is that, with the "predator" having withdrawn and a bunch of fresh meat just waiting with no other challengers to claim it, the last of the taint-maggots will be tempted into showing itself.
...
*Squee*
*Shhhhlop*
And there it is.
You give the entity time to drag itself out of its haven and slimily slither over to the corpses of its kin, and then, as quickly as you can, you power up an Overloaded Spirit Blast.
Sensing the sudden buildup of power, the maggot shrieks in alarm, dropping a mouthful of fresh meat-
*ZAP-POP!*
*SPLATTER!*
-ugh, just when you thought these things couldn't get any more disgusting! Your powered-up projectile scored another direct, down-the-hatch hit, vanished right down the spiritual vermin's gullet, and then apparently hit something that really didn't agree with it, causing the worm to EXPLODE.
Fortunately, the resulting shower of gore was mostly directly away from you, so you aren't spattered with corrupt bile and worm-bits, but what even... no, WHY even...?
Gained Spirit Blast E (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
You take a moment to probe around with your Corruption Sense, but as soon as you're reasonably sure there's nothing else in here but inert taint, you end the Power Vision and come back to reality.
"How'd it go?" Briar asks.
"No golden pyrotechnics this time?" Ambrose wonders.
"I'm getting a little low on mana, so I figured I'd give pure spiritual techniques a go," you answer the wizard first, before turning to your partner. "And it went well. All maggoty corruption-things dead and accounted for, some of them more disgustingly than others."
"Isn't that just always the way?" Balthazar asks rhetorically.
Everybody in the room simply nods, and then you slide your ruby lens back into position and take another look at the zanpakuto to see what effect "killing" the embodiments of its taint had, if any.
...
Well, that burn damage that you spotted before didn't get any worse from this second round of cleansing-by-vision, but it's thinned even more, enough that the bare metal of the zanpakuto has been exposed in a few places - tiny spots, not much bigger than the tip of a blunt pencil, but significant considering what the sword looked like before. Those patterns within the corruption have been completely disrupted, leaving only blotchy masses of tainted material like what was covering the rest of the weapon.
Success?
You decide to get on with the ritual cleansing, if only so that Shadow Alex can finally let the Spell of Sharesister lapse.
"THANK you," he mutters.
Ambrose's spellcasting chamber is excellently set up for most magical endeavors, including the matter of purification, but as his usual method is purely arcane in nature, you still have to cast the Spell of Consecration to (temporarily) dedicate the area to the Goddesses and attune it to the cleansing power of Light Magic.
In light of your low mana reserve, you'd prefer not to cast the spell yourself, but it's occurred to you that while you could ask Shadow Alex to do it, you just picked up a magic wand that was imbued with the spell you need. True, the effect won't have the reach or the duration that it would if you'd cast the magic yourself, but you don't exactly need to hit a target fifty feet away or keep the chamber sanctified until some time tomorrow morning. The Wand has plenty of charges left, and you probably SHOULD take it for a test drive at some point, if only to see how dedicating an area to your favorite deities with "local methods" differs from your usual approach - so why not now?
"I dedicate this site to the Golden Goddesses," your voice echoes a bit in the big room. "Din, watch over me here, and grant me Power. Nayru, watch over me here, and grant me Wisdom. Farore, watch over me here, and grant me Courage. Goddesses, watch over me here."
A slender column of golden light shines down upon the casting circle and the corrupted sword within it, and for a moment, the emblem of the Triforce glows upon the stones. Then the energy surges outward, roiling across the floor like a low-lying incandescent cloud, while in its wake, the surface seems to glow.
Urahara watches the whole process with interest, not making a move to avoid the oncoming swell of misty golden energy. He does shuffle his feet a bit after it's passed, though.
Ambrose levitates his chair a bit higher to avoid it being caught by the wave.
Balthazar's reaction is closer to Urahara's, although his interest is much less energetic, suggesting that he's seen this particular spell in action at least once before.
With that out of the way, you begin the ritual proper, this time channeling not only Light Magic but also spiritual energy into the effort.
...
A couple of minutes of chanting and mystical pushing later, you start feeling a bit... underwhelmed? Disappointed, maybe?
When you were cleansing Uncle Rory's taxidermy collection of its years of built-up Hellmouth crude, this was the point where the vaguely demonic animal spirits started waking up and actively fighting back against your efforts to drive them out of their host-bodies, visibly manifesting themselves in various attempts at scaring you off. Here, you're technically putting in twice the effort - or even more than that, considering how much your power has grown over the last year - but you're getting no real sense of conscious or even UN-conscious resistance from the tainted zanpakuto, which is a far more spiritually potent object than any one of your uncle's creations, or even the whole lot of them put together.
It's more like, instead of trying to help your mother give a certain baby sister a bath without suds and bathwater getting splashed everywhere, you're just helping scrub some dinner plates. It's easy, routine, and uneventful.
It is, quite simply, dull.
Things get a little more interesting as the building Light-energy reaches the point where the corruption begins reacting to it, hissing and sizzling as it ever-so-slowly burns away. Bit by bit, those tiny, irregularly-shaped spots of exposed metal grow larger as the solidified taint around them is pushed back, while the dull quality of the spiritual steel grows brighter as the demonic energy sunk into it is purged. After a time, however, that too starts to become routine.
Upon reaching the end of the rite without incident, you release the purifying energies and give them a minute to disperse before re-focusing your Spell to Analyze Dweomers on the fragments of the zanpakuto. Behind you, you sense Ambrose and Balthazar doing similar things.
...
As far as you can tell, the weapon is clean, but you don't sense any equivalents to the patterns that the corruption displayed. At best, there are fragmented lines and faded impressions of what might have BEEN such matrices, decades ago, but now...
"May I?" Urahara asks, gesturing towards the pieces of the blade.
You signal for him to go ahead, and he steps up, takes hold of the tatter-wrapped hilt, unlatches the lower portion of the weapon from its stand, and "draws" it for an inspection. This involves a certain amount of visual examination, spiritual prodding, and the assuming of a few stances and execution of some very basic moves.
Then he stops, nods, and places the shattered length of sword back on the stand.
"Completely dead," the Shinigami replies.
Not for long!
...hopefully, anyway.
Expended 1 charge from Wand of Consecration, 17 charges now remain
You'd initially allotted yourself plenty of time to attempt to purify Kita Yudai's zanpakuto and study the aftermath, and your various enhancements were adjusted accordingly, but a combat-grade use of Power combined with that unplanned pause to investigate the Hawaiian Sorcerer and his (former) Monkey Familiar ate up a lot of the time on those buffs.
Fortunately, while you do have to resort to a mid-tier ritual to invoke the spell you have in mind, there is just enough time to do so before most of your buffs give out - if you start on that right away.
And so, you do.
Over the next few minutes, the latches and clamps holding the pieces of the broken blade in place are opened, their previous holdings proceeding to hover in place as the burgeoning telekinetic field of your spell takes hold of them and begins to steer them into position. Here, two jagged-edged pieces float next to one another, comparing their broken sides at different elevations and orientations; there, two smoother fragments slide unsteadily together, seeking a point where their near-fit becomes a perfect one; and after a bit, the hilt hovers free of its resting place and assumes a position, inverted, at the top of the ongoing assembly.
You feel your enhancements waning steadily throughout this, but as predicted, they hold out just long enough for you to speak the final words: "BE WHOLE!"
Energy pulses along the katana, flaring through every visible crack and previously unseen fracture, and there is a sudden, sharp *snap* as all the floating pieces join together as one.
The result... is still a very battered-looking sword, its edge chipped in some places and in others pitted where corrosion wore it away, leaving nothing for your Even Greater Ritual to Make Whole to work with. But it IS once again recognizable as a sword, instead of as a bunch of pieces of a sword.
While Shadow Alex lets out a sigh of relief at the end of the Spell of Sharesister, you float the zanpakuto back into the uppermost part of the stand and peer at it through your ruby lens once more, taking in the results of your repair effort on a more arcane level.
...
It didn't work. Whether for a lack of power - which, with no boasting, you VERY much doubt is the case - or for a lack of understanding about just what it is that makes a zanpakuto a zanpakuto - much more likely, you are forced to admit - the blade before you is simply a mass of spiritual steel, its only "powers" being the inherent properties of the metal and the fact that it is, however degraded, a sword. There is no indication that a spirit is or ever was present within the thing, nor that there could ever be one again.
It is, as Urahara said, a dead blade.
Your disappointment does have a silver lining: at least this way, when you hand the zanpakuto back to the Soul Society, they'll have a weapon that they can actually use in a memorial service or put on display somewhere, without having to worry about it contaminating everyone and everything nearby.
That, plus your Literary Vision's testimony as to the final mission and ultimate fate of Kita Yudai, seems like a worthy tribute for a man who fought to the death to see his duty done.
Checking the time, you find that it is just past four in the afternoon here in Wales, which would make it eight in the morning back in Sunnydale and mere minutes after midnight in Japan.
Is there anything else you feel the need to do on this visit, that ISN'T an attempt to make more deals?
As you're cleaning up the aftermath of your purification ritual - Shadow Alex obligingly providing a Spell to Dispel Magic to purge the traces of your work from the zanpakuto, in case of later analysis - Ambrose tells you not to worry about the consecrated flooring.
"The wards in here are designed to clean themselves of residual energies," he explains from his hovering chair. "That part of the system will kick in once everybody is out of the room and the door is closed."
"Sounds like a handy thing to have," you admit. "Although considering everything ELSE these wards must do" - you glance around at the complex array of metals and crystals covering all six surfaces - "it must have been a pain to set up."
"It took some work," the wizard admits. "It's terribly convenient NOW, of course, but at the time, I would have preferred to set up multiple ritual chambers outfitted for different purposes, rather than this one-size-fits-all approach."
"Then why...?"
Ambrose's shrug is almost lost in the upholstery of his chair. "There was only so much room the Drakes were willing to part with, and using spatial or extra-dimensional expansion tricks to build a spellcasting chamber is asking for trouble - not to mention pricey."
Um. "Does that include building a chamber like this on a demiplane?"
"Hm? No, no, a proper demiplane is stable enough not to have the sort of troublesome interactions I'm thinking of. At least as long as you remember not to fire off a Disjunction or carelessly warp reality while you're inside the thing, I mean."
You will be certain to keep that in- wait a minute.
"If your chamber is self-cleaning, why were you worried about rotten egg smells when I was testing the Necklace of Adaptation earlier?"
"It's the principle of the thing!" Ambrose protests.
Principle of being a pain in the neck, maybe...
On that subject, however, you reach to your neck and tug the chain of the just-mentioned ornament until you're able to view the central pendant directly. It doesn't look like it was scratched or seared by your brief uses of Power, and when you probe it with your mystical senses, the readings don't feel any different from your earlier examinations.
"Do you think it's been working for both of us all this time, Briar?" you ask.
"I think so," your partner replies. "At least, I haven't stopped feeling that fresh outdoorsy air sensation this whole time, and it's been, what, five hours since you put that thing on?"
"Getting on towards six, by now," you agree.
Either way, you'll keep this item.
Gained Necklace of Adaptation
As you make your way back to the teleportation room, your gaze strays to all the "treasure rooms" lining the hall.
"How has Altria been doing, trying to find or break into this hoard, anyway?" you venture.
"She's turned up in the lower-security rooms in the basement a few times now," Ambrose chuckles. "Going from what the cameras have caught and the guards' reports, she was disappointed when we moved all the magical items, but has been amusing herself with the mundane arms and armor just fine - and of course, all the shiny things."
Ah, yes. The Wandenreich weren't exactly paving their floors with gold or anything so extravagant, but you did find (and take) a decent amount of gold, silver, and jewels in various non-magical forms, to say nothing of artworks, furniture, and furnishings.
"Also, fair warning, lad," the wizard continues. "You may have to fight her for that armchair you swiped."
...
...
A five-hour field trial is certainly a good start at gathering data on the capabilities of this Necklace, but if you're going to be trusting your life and Briar's to it, you want more information.
"So, what, am I supposed to just exist within your personal bubble for the next eighteen hours or something?" Briar wonders. She... doesn't actually sound offended or anything by that scenario, just puzzled. "Because that could get a little awkward."
It could, but there are other things besides raw endurance that you could test, like how well the Necklace's contained environment keeps up when you're working out-
"I'm going to go ahead and veto any Body Flicker testing that involves me," Briar interjects.
-what it looks like under proper analytical spells, how it holds up in different climates, and so on.
"Sounds like a project for when you've got a slow week or two," your partner says.
"I wonder what that's like," Shadow Alex comments.
Ha-ha.
...which basement room did he say the chair was stashed in, again?
"I didn't say," Ambrose replies, "but if you're planning to take it with you...?"
You think that might be for the best, yes. Let it not be said of you that you would allow anyone, even a friend, to appropriate from you that which you have rightfully plundered.
The wizard shrugs and gives you directions that will get you downstairs and to the room in question seen by the fewest number of people possible, and all of those members of the staff who'll know better than to say a word.
You thank him, excuse yourself, and head down.
As promised, you pass only three people on the way, one of those a maid who doesn't even see you, having her back turned to the door of the storage room where she's going through boxes for some reason. The two security guards that you spot DO see you, but the first just nods and waves you on to the room in question, having been alerted by Ambrose ahead of time, while the second swings the door open for you.
Thanking the man, you step inside-
!
-and stop in your tracks.
Although the contents of this room definitely qualify as a treasure hoard, or at least as part of one, it is not the sort that you'd find spread out in a cave to serve as a dragon's bedding. Gold, silver, and jewels are there to be seen, but neatly organized along the shelves, so that each piece is given a measure of space - if not so much as the magic items in Ambrose's collection were. Boxes of all sorts sit with their lids open and their frames turned so that the contents can catch the light to good effect, setting polished metal and gems alike to sparkling, several statues and wooden cabinets have been placed under or between the shelves, and several empty screw-holes along back wall suggest that a high row of shelves was pulled out to make room for the paintings that now hang there.
Whether by coincidence or conscious decision - and you're leaning very much towards the latter - Jugram's Chair was placed just ahead of the center of that farthest wall, as if to give the occupant the best vantage point from which to regard all the shinies on display - most of which, you note, have also been positioned so that they can be seen from that spot.
Sitting on the right arm of the chair is the mostly cream-colored Remlitt, Yvaine, who preens smugly as by-now skilled fingers scratch behind one of her floppy ears.
And sitting in the chair proper, projecting a good attempt at the regal air displayed by the Simulacrum of her older past-self, is Altria.
"We meet again, Mr. Harris."
And then she starts talking, and all you can see is the World's Smallest Bond Villain.
"Do you expect me to talk?" you ask levelly.
For the record, you've never actually seen Goldfinger in its entirety; you only know the line from a clip that was part of an ad on a movie your parents rented. You're also aware that Goldfinger wasn't the Bond villain with the cat - you don't recall the name, but you know that the guy in question was the inspiration for Dr. Evil, though the Austin Powers movies are two more that you only know from general media awareness, your parents having ruled that you weren't old enough to see them yet.
The reason you went with that line regardless is because you know Altria has been trying to find out what you, Ambrose, and her father have been up to since the day of the Silbern Raid.
"No, Mr. Harris," your friend-turned-interrogator replies. "I expect you to fly."
...
"...do you mean literally, or-"
"I meant in the sense of running away," she answers. "You know, 'Fly, you fools'?"
"I get that," you answer, recognizing the Gandalf quote and guessing that Ambrose is at least partly responsible for Altria's awareness of and reference to it. "It's just, I actually CAN fly, you know? That opens up room for confusion."
"Give me a break, will you? I had to find a rhyme for 'die' that wasn't too long and didn't sound totally silly."
"And how long have you been working on that?" you ask shrewdly.
Altria refuses to make eye contact as she mutters, "A while."
"Maybe fifteen minutes," the guard in the hall offers.
"Lewis!" Altria hisses.
"And the chair?" you inquire.
"Well, I wasn't about to sit on the floor while I waited, and it IS a very comfortable chair," Altria replies. "But that aside, it's much more broken-in and less... materially valuable... than any of the other loot you grabbed, which has led me to think there's another story here. So, is there?"
"That is for me to know and you to wonder at, for now. All I am here for is the chair."
"And you can have it." Contrary to those words, Altria sort of settles deeper into the chair, which causes Yvaine to sink her claws into the arm a bit. "But not without giving me some answers."
You draw yourself up, signaling silently to Briar through the familiar bond: / Be ready. /
/ Huh? I mean, for what? /
"I see," you say aloud. "Well, Miss Drake; you have chosen a worthy cause to do battle over-"
And then you cast the Spell to Shrink Items.
Altria jolts in the chair. "Alex, what-"
"Are you SERIOUSLY-"
"Mrowr?"
Completing the short chant, you pass the magic off to Briar with an unspoken, / Get the chair! /
Your partner takes off from her perch, flying straight for the chair-
"Wha- Yvaine, NO."
"Mrowr!" the Remlitt protests, as her mistress holds her back from pouncing the pretty glowing flying thing.
-and tapping it.
*Plush!*
"WHAT THE-?!"
"MROWR?!"
Suddenly deprived of their twice-stolen comfy seat, Altria and Yvaine are reintroduced to gravity and the floor in short order, while Briar snatches the tiny, even-plushier recliner out from under them and zips back towards you.
"-but the Chair is MINE!"
Gained Skullduggery E (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
"You mean 'ours'!"
"I meant ours!" you correct yourself swiftly. "The Chair is OURS!"
"That's better!"
"Alex! Get back here!"
Nope.
Fairy back on shoulder and tiny chair in pocket, you turn and make a break for it, trusting in your briefly head start and longer legs to make it back to the wizard's quarters before an annoyed Welsh dragon can catch up with-
!
-a pulse of draconic mana from behind has you suddenly recalculating.
"She isn't seriously-?" you ask, resisting the impulse to look back over your shoulder.
"She IS!" Briar reports. "And here she comes!"
"You'll never take me alive!" you declare, as you activate your Ki Enhancement, throwing additional power into the mix for maximum effect - and also for that faint telltale glow.
Look, if your friend is going to be zooming around like a tiny comet, it seems only right and proper that YOU be zooming around like a larger comet.
"Just watch me!"
"Waaaa-!" Briar exclaims from her perch.
There is no accompanying comment from Yvraine this time, which has you briefly wondering if the Remlitt kitten was left behind in the storage room, if she's trailing along in Altria's wake at her own pace - as cats are wont to do - or if she's clinging to her mistress in terror, too scared to make a sound.
Hopefully it isn't the latter, you think idly, as the underground hall begins to blur around you.
"Goodness-!" the maid exclaims as she exits that room with a box of stuff in her arms, only to freeze in shock at the sight of you approaching like an oncoming undersized locomotive!
You veer to the left to avoid a collision, calling out, "Sorry!" as you pass her.
"-aaaa-!"
"Sorry, Maura!" Altria calls.
And the chase continues.
Down the hall you thunder, a tiny dragon on your tail.
Up the stairs and into a turn you go, utilizing a quickly-activated Ki Step to not so much run along the wall - the skill isn't that developed, if its basic form ever can get to that point, and you aren't moving so fast as to overcome gravity - as to kick off of it in such a way as to conserve as much of your momentum as possible.
And then, when the stair turns for a second time half a dozen steps up, you do it again.
And then you repeat it again.
Gained Ki Step C (Plus) (Plus) (Plus)
And all the while, Altria remains hot on your heels. In fact, while you can't spare a backwards glance at these speeds to confirm it when you're on the stairs like this-
"-aaaa-!"
-and while Briar is in no state to give you a report, the blaze on your sensory radar makes it pretty clear that your dragon-powered pursuer is starting to catch up.
It must be the size difference, part of you reflects. Your greater mass is generally an advantage, but when it comes to matters of acceleration and cornering, having more weight to haul and throw around is not so helpful a thing...
The rest of you is readying a Flicker, and considering where to aim it, so to speak.
You could focus on going straight back to Ambrose's suite, but there are two, perhaps three issues with that. First is that it's what Altria will EXPECT you to do, and she's probably readying herself to push to overtake you in the upcoming hall. Second, Ambrose has mentioned wanting to keep Altria from running into any of the knight-Simulacra with their helmets off, which might happen if you lead her straight back to the place.
And third, you aren't entirely certain that Ambrose won't have locked you out. Even if he didn't somehow arrange for Altria to be down in the "vault" ahead of you, not letting you back into his sanctum just long enough for you to get caught by the dragon on your six seems like the sort of thing he'd do.
Another option would be to take a roundabout course and try to lose Altria in the halls, although given this IS her home, you have your doubts about that. More likely you'd just be drawing out the chase before its inevitable end, and keeping your friend away from the Fake Knights of the Round Table.
Tying into both options is that earlier thought you had about throwing out a Doppelganger to try and confuse Altria. The only question there is how well that technique will be able to mimic your current state of high-speed movement...
And wherever you go...
You consider using the Spell of Opening and Closing to pop open a window and then jump outside, but a quick search of memory fails to turn up any good prospects for the idea. It's not that the Drake home lacks for large windows or windows that can be opened, you just can't call to mind any that combine those qualities AND open far enough for a kid to pass through - much less a kid of your size, moving at your current speed.
That's not even getting into the matter of window screens.
There probably IS a suitable window somewhere in the house, but you aren't confident in finding it and successfully defenestrating yourself - much less doing so safely - before Altria catches up to you, even if you use a distraction or three to throw her off your trail. With that in mind, you figure that you'd better try a different approach.
But what? What direction should you go? What methods should you use to get there? What resources do you retain, and what of those are you willing to use?
What have you got in your pocket?
...
Oh, that could work.
You head for the nearest corner, dash around it, and then act QUICKLY.
Out goes a Doppelganger, its blurry features actually suiting the speed at which it seems to be moving down the middle of the hall.
Out of your pocket comes the Ring of Invisibility, as you veer to the right-hand side of the hall and begin to slow down.
Onto your finger goes the Ring, and out of sight you go - the telltale glow of your Overloaded Ki Enhancement winking out as you filter out the excess power.
A moment later, Altria comes blazing around the bend and rushes past you like a rocket.
You see almost immediately that your Doppelganger isn't going to be able to outrun her. Whether it's an innate inability of the technique, a consequence of your still-limited proficiency with the skill, or simply because you turned off the extra boost to your self-enhancement to avoid compromising your stealth, your ki-construct lookalike has greatly slowed from its initial burst of movement.
"Gotcha-HUH?!"
The instant Altria's glowing hands close on the Doppelganger, it disperses with a burst of something like scentless smoke, which rapidly disperses back into the air from which it was originally gathered. This leaves the small girl looking around in confusion for a brief instant, before her eyes narrow in suspicion.
"So that's how it's going to be, is it?" she mutters, before... reaching out and sweeping her hands through the air around her.
She's on to you! And so quickly, too...
Simultaneously disappointed that your ruse of illusions was seen through so suddenly and proud of your friend for doing it, you quickly consider your next move.
Standing still and hoping Altria goes in the wrong direction is not an appealing idea, and becomes entirely unacceptable when she starts coming back down the hall in your direction.
You could try to sneak away. You're currently invisible, your mundane stealth skills are not too shabby, and your still-active Ki Step technique will provide considerable assistance, such that you think you could get out of this hall unheard. Then again, this is another area where your size works against you, especially on hardwood floors that don't do a thing to muffle one's footfalls, and Altria is free to move around faster than you even while searching, so she might catch up before you can get far enough away to risk speeding up.
Alternately, there's a window at the end of this corridor that is within range of the cantrip you were considering casting. If you were to open it from here, the noise and visible movement might draw Altria off - or you could use the Cantrip of Ghost Sound to generate the noise directly. The only issue there is that she might hear you casting the spells and ignore their effects in favor of going for the source.
Or perhaps there's another option? Preferably one that doesn't involve any more magic, though; not only are your reserves tanked, it feels rather like cheating in a contest that started out friendly, and hopefully still is despite your use of a magic ring.
Simply teleporting away is right out.
You are unsure of your ability to get a spell off without drawing Altria's attention. You've managed to "quietly" cast spells before, but you've yet to work out how to remove the need for words entirely, and you're close enough - and the possibility of Altria's hearing being enhanced by her mana-boosting technique is high enough - that you can't rule out the possibility of her overhearing even a murmured or whispered chant.
With that option eliminated and staying put not a consideration to begin with, your only real option seems to be to make like a shinobi and nin-nin away.
So, you turn about and start doing that.
*Sneak*
"I know you're here, Alex," Altria calls in a warning tone. "Don't make this any harder on yourself."
You manfully resist the impulse to voice a witty rejoinder - but an idea occurs to you then, born of a similar vein of mischief and much less likely to betray your location. Heeding that rogue thought, you reach into your pocket to fish around for a loose coin, a bit of treasure that might be suitably shiny to distract the small dragon from her hunt.
*Sneaky feet*
Ever so slowly, you creep back towards the corner that you ducked around to break contact a moment ago. Even with the Ki Step technique helping, ensuring the silence of your footfalls requires you to move a bit more slowly than Altria, yet your strides are longer than hers, and inch by inch, step by step, you start to put some distance between you. You are careful to avoid the small tables, armor displays, and other knick-knacks adding to the decor, and slowly - with the soft shuffle of Altria's house-slippers and the lowered but still present blaze of her aura behind you - you reach the intersection and slip a few steps back the way you came from.
Then you take out the coin, which unsurprisingly, turns out to be gold. You regard it for a moment.
Then, balancing the coin on your thumb and forefinger, you give it a flick-
*Ping*
-which sends the coin flying further down the hall towards the basement stairs. And while Altria goes for that...
*Ping*
There is a moment in which the faint sounds of Altria's light footsteps and searching motions fall utterly silent, while the ring of your fingers' strike against the gold coin now spinning through the air seems to echo down the halls. Your exotic senses register a sudden, sharp *intent* from just around the corner, and you quickly tuck yourself into a makeshift alcove between a table with a vase and a display case holding a suit of armor.
Your repositioning was just in time, because a moment later, Altria's mana-wreathed form - aura once again blazing bright - rockets down the corridor and comes to a dead stop in the middle of the intersection, head already locked on the bit of gold falling through the air.
For a second, she just stands there, watching the coin as it tumbles closer to the floor. Her expression and body language at this point are partly those of a predator that has just caught sight of its favored prey, and partly like a kid who just got the present they wanted for their birthday or Christmas.
When the coin touches down, there is another, *Pi-*
*Zoom*
*-ng,*
as the bright metal meets a hard surface and rebounds off it.
You do not hear a third impact, which is undoubtedly because Altria has already snatched the thing out of the air - but you can't confirm that visually, having already turned away and begun shuffling quietly up the hall towards Ambrose's apartments.
...
You're never getting that coin back, are you?
Well, considering the day's huge windfall of magical items and the mundane plunder you're still due to receive, it's no loss. One might even call it money well spent.
Lost 1 gold coin
"Wuh, wha-?" you hear from behind you. "I mean, wait! No! That wasn't funny, Alex!"
That's a matter of perspective. From where you're standing-
"Get back here!"
-you pause and glance over your shoulder at the flaring aura, worried that Altria might be about to come barreling down the hallway at you, but no, she's stopped in the intersection again and is doing her best to look down all four corridors at once.
"Oooh, when I get my hands on you and your gold- no, I mean- arrgh!"
Satisfied, you turn to leave-
!
-and then sidestep as quickly and as quietly as you can, as Altria goes running by at ridiculous speed. She's hardly looking where she's going and isn't trying to search around as she moves, instead focusing on getting somewhere else as quickly as possible.
At a guess, you'd say she's going for the entrance to Ambrose's suite, to try and cut you off.
You decide not to draw out the "hunt" any longer than it really needs to be, and start making your way back to Ambrose's quarters. You don't hurry, wanting to preserve the element of surprise for a certain something, but you don't dawdle, either, simply moving as quickly as you feel you can without making obvious amounts of noise.
"What's the plan?" Briar asks conspiratorially.
"I was thinking, sneak up on Altria, catch her in a bear hug, and let the noise give Ambrose enough time to make sure the knights aren't anywhere in sight before I haul her in."
"And what makes you think the wizard will notice?" Briar asks lightly.
"What makes you think he hasn't been monitoring Altria this entire time?" you reply in the same tone.
Because he can't scry on you, thanks to your Spell of Mind Blank - which is going to need replacement in the next hour and a half, you note - but until she gets around to learning that magic-resistance technique her uncle demonstrated for you once, Altria's personal defenses against being magically spied on are going to be much less certain than your own, unless she gets some assistance from Ambrose or her sister - and with respect to Anna Drake's skills, the wizard would almost certainly be able to see through her work, and would most likely take the extra steps required to be able to see through his own. Quite aside from that, there is the non-zero possibility that Ambrose has some degree of access to the Drakes' security system and has been following this little game via camera, which your Spell of Mind Blank wouldn't interfere with.
...well, not unless the cameras were enhanced with Divination Magic. But even then, the purely mundane function of the things wouldn't be impeded.
Briar acknowledges your point with a hum, and the rest of your short trip back to Ambrose's rooms is conducted in silence.
As expected, Altria has taken up a position next to the door, positioned to its left so that she won't be suddenly blinded - or hit - if it suddenly swings open. She's dialed back her enhancement technique but hasn't entirely dismissed it; from the way it thrums about her person now, concentrated about the head but also still wreathing the limbs, you'd venture that she's trying to enhance her senses and reflexes.
The main downside to giving somebody a surprise hug from straight ahead is that if they decide they don't want to be hugged, they're in the best position to resist, be it by pushing back with their arms, delivering a headbutt, or - most relevantly, given some of Altria's past threats and actions - kicking shins.
As such, you take a second to ready your Ki Armor before closing in. Fortunately, with Mind Blank up, the shift in your aura is undetectable.
That done, you creep forward-
*Sneak*
-arms raised and ready to strike-
*Sneaky feet*
-relying on your stealth skills, Ki Step technique, and controlled breathing to go unnoticed.
*Sneaky ninja feet*
Although at a certain range, you just hold your breath entirely, not wanting a faint exhalation or a sudden bit of dust getting caught in your throat to give away the ruse.
At optimum range, you lunge-
That cowlick of hers suddenly twitches, and Altria's head - previously glancing off to the right - turns sharply in your direction, as she raises her guard, how did she even-!
You have no idea what gave you away. Did your footsteps make the floor shift? Did Altria's mana-enhanced senses and combat training allow her to pick up the air being displaced by your advancing form? Did she SMELL you?
Regardless of the reason, you still have SOMETHING of the element of surprise, your advantages of invisibility and size remain undiminished-
!
-and your choice to raise your Ki Armor proves to have been a good one, as the instant your arms close around your friend's shoulders, she seems to get enough of a sense of Where You Are to aim a clear kick at your shins. You DO start to fade back into visibility at the moment of contact, but the breaking of your new Ring's Invisibility is a bit too slow to account for the good aim of Altria's first retaliatory strike.
"Sneak!" Altria cries, kicking you again and shifting about to try and break your hold. "Cheat! Put me down, Alex!"
"I have caught you, it is my victory!"
"Never!"
"Never is a long time!"
"Uh, Miss?"
The two of you pause in mid-wrestle and look down the hall, to where another member of the staff just came around the corner and is now standing there, trying to hide his surprise at something under the expected veneer of an unflappable British servant.
"Yes, James?" Altria asks calmly.
"Is everything... alright?"
"It's fine, it's merely a guest using invisibility spells to cheat at-"
"I was not cheating," you reply.
"You absolutely were."
"You kind of were, Alex," Briar agrees.
"You're a fine one to talk!"
"Hey, don't hate the fairy, hate the magic."
"How does that even- no, never mind. James, was it?"
"Uh... yes, sir?"
"Would you mind getting the door for us?"
"What?!" Altria blurts. "No!"
"I have a victory march to make and a trophy to show off," you continue, raising Altria a bit higher briefly to indicate the "trophy" in question.
"James, don't you dare!" Altria says.
"Um... it is staff policy to fulfill reasonable requests of invited guests - you ARE invited, right sir?"
"No, he's absolutely not!"
"The wizard invited me," you reply. "Does that count?"
"It doesn't!"
"It actually does, Miss," James says apologetically. "But it's also policy that instructions of the family take precedence, sir, so-"
"Never mind," Briar says, as she flies far enough away from you to take her human guise. "I'll get it."
James just about jumps out of his skin. "What the-!?"
"Thank you, Briar."
"Any time, Alex."
"Et tu, Briar?" Altria gasps.
"Sorry, not sorry," the fairy replies cheerfully. "Partners~."
"Ambrose," you call, as you march into the apartment, "I have captured a dragon! What shall we do with her?"
The wizard's answering laughter has Altria struggling all the harder to escape. Alas for her, it is not enough to overcome the awesome power of your hold.
Ambrose, Balthazar, Urahara, and the Shadows prove to have relocated to the sitting room where you all took your earlier meal, with the rest of the doors lining the hall closed and - from the feel of things - with at least their low-security wards reactivated. You haul your catch in and re-introduce her to the Merlinean Master and the Dark Selves, and then provide the "cover" introduction for the shopkeeper-slash-spiritual scientist, leaving off his Shinigami status.
"Mr. Urahara." Altria greets the man with a nod and as much dignity as she can muster while being carried about like a sixty-pound sack. "My apologies for my unbecoming circumstances. They are entirely Alex's fault."
"Wait, how is it my fault you're not a better wrestler?" you wonder.
"Not to worry, young lady," Urahara replies, tipping his hat. "I know people who can be at least as bad-"
"Hey!"
"-and via similar reasoning."
...
Now, is he referring to Eleventh Division with that statement, or to Kurosaki Isshin? Because you wouldn't mind being compared to the former so much, but being compared to the latter is a lot more likely - at least going by what you know of the people Urahara has dealt with the most directly and extensively over the last few years - and Ichigo has shared some stories about his old man's more ridiculous antics that make it a rather less welcome association, like the time Isshin tried to "encourage" his son's interest in martial arts by surprise-attacking him first thing in the morning, or how he's started doing that AGAIN since Ichigo got his new Wooden Sword from the Goddesses.
And apparently, where Masaki stepped in to put a stop to the first round of idiocy, this time around, she's not interfering? You aren't sure if the lady of the Kurosaki household genuinely thinks that sort of experience is required or helpful for her son becoming a swordsman, or if she's secretly trying to get Isshin to drive any enthusiasm for armed melee combat out of their boy, so that Ichigo will be more likely to take up archery instead.
Between that and your own sense of propriety starting to reassert itself, you grudgingly set Altria down on her own two feet, dodging a stomp and catching a follow-up kick with a counter-kick.
"Hey, now," Briar chides, back to her normal size. "I know he deserves it-"
What happened to "Partners~", again?
"-but if you kick him around, he won't show off any of the shiny things he picked up."
Altria pauses at that and visibly considers.
As for you...
You decide to start off with something "close to home," as it were, and spent a moment digging through one of your newly-claimed Bags of Holding before pulling out the Scotsman's Sword. This you show off to Altria - knowing better than to wave it around, of course - while recounting the tale of its former master and his years- and planes-spanning hunt for the demon Plotcock.
That tale eventually leads into the Scotsman's meeting with his musically gifted and shadow-tainted countryman, and so the Wailing Pipes come out for a bit as well. Much as you didn't swing the Sword around, you don't attempt to play the Pipes, a decision that ultimately seems to relieve Altria, if her suddenly wary attitude at the instrument's appearance and brief sigh when you put it away again are any indication.
After that, there is the Crown of the Quincy King. There isn't nearly as much to tell about this one, as Altria has already heard of your Shadow's adventure in Silbern, but the shiny nature of the thing clearly meets with her complete approval.
And then there is the Black Knight's panoply. Given what a nuisance it would be to unpack and set up the entire thing, you leave it in the Bag, instead having Shadow Alex whip up an illusion of the completed set in the hall. Altria is duly impressed by the mock-display, and listens attentively to your recount of its history.
While you have many new treasures besides these to show off and could go into much more detail about the ones you have shown off to your friend, it would be the work of a couple of hours at least. You don't really have the patience for more standing around talking today - not to mention that you could really use a break from all the talking - Altria's the only one in the room that hasn't heard most of those stories already anyway, and you DO have a shopkeeper to be getting back to his business.
And so it is to some draconic disappointment-
"Are you SURE you won't stay for dinner?" Altria asks.
"I've spent six of the last seven hours either working magic or reading off the results of working magic," you reply. "I need a break and possibly a nap. But don't worry," you add, at your friend's dismayed look. "The wizard knows what I took and heard ALL the stories."
Altria's head turns towards Ambrose with an air of intent.
The wizard turns to you. "Thank you, ever so much."
"You're welcome."
-that you pack up your plunder once again, gather up Shinigami and Shadows, and head for the teleport closet.
You ask Balthazar if he'd like to accompany you, but he says he'll make his own way back to New York. As this will spare you having to add further stops to your trip, you're fine with it.
Given the state of your reserves, Shadow Alex will be handling the teleportation. He also takes a moment to set up his own Mind Blank spell - perhaps a bit wasteful, given the state of his own much-reduced mana reserve, how long the spell usually lasts, and how short a time your Dark Self will be around after this, but neither of you are keen on him being out from under Ambrose's wards without that defense.
It seems only polite to heed the local custom for arriving international magical travelers and make use of the Tokyo Tower in its "landing zone" function. That in turn will require a disguise, and while the idea of dressing up as a businessman comes to mind, it's a guise you've already used a couple of variations on in the past. Surely, there must be something else...
Your gaze drifts towards Urahara's striped hat, dark haori, and green samue.
You grin.
"I sense mischief," Briar notes.
You hum an affirmative and take your Shadow aside for a quick discussion, getting out the Bag of Holding as you do so.
Your Dark Self glances at Urahara and chuckles, before digging into the sack.
"I also sense mischief," the shopkeeper says, though he doesn't sound worried.
Out come the Banded Hat and Cowboy Lake's Hat, with a small argument ensuing before you don The Banded Hat.
and your Shadow takes the other.
Then each of you casts a slightly Extended Spell to Alter One's Self, and seconds later, two more guys dressed like Urahara are standing in the room. The resemblance isn't precise enough for you to pass as triplets - Alter Self can't duplicate the appearance of a specific individual - and your clothes and the stripes on your hat are colored red and your Shadow's a burnt yellow rather than green, but the styles are otherwise a match.
Urahara looks the two of you over closely, and then nods. "I approve."
From there, final goodbyes are said, and it's a straightforward teleport to the Tower.
Given that it's somewhere past 12:20 at night in Japan, the place is emptier than you've ever seen it before, even during your various early-morning arrivals.
Urahara looks around for a moment and then turns back to you. "So, were you planning to wait for a customs agent to show up, or just to be on your way? Because it seems like it would be a terrible waste to create such fine outfits and then not give them a chance to be seen."
He's not biased, of course.
"Not in the least," he agrees with a grin and a wave of his fan.
Given a choice between wearing a cowboy hat or wearing a witch's hat, most California boys your age would pick the former, at least when it wasn't Halloween.
You aren't most guys, and pull the Banded Hat onto your head without any hesitation.
Shadow Alex frowns for a moment, then shrugs and pulls on Cowboy Lake's Hat, which promptly casts his already shadowed features into a deeper gloom.
"How's it feel?" he asks, as he adjusts his headgear.
"Snug, without being constricting or itchy," you reply. "Yours?"
"The same," he admits. "Let's hear it for magic hats, I guess?"
"Huzzah!" Shadow Briar cries.
When the two of you transform, you note that even with its altered appearance, Shadow Alex's bucket hat is still casting that darker than usual shadow over his features. You find this to be entirely suitable for someone who now looks like Urahara.
Urahara has a point about giving your work a chance to be seen, and quite aside from that, it's become a habit of yours to stop by and visit the kami of the Tower when you pass through, however brief your stay might be.
"Let's take a walk," you suggest.
"After you," Urahara says, gesturing towards the empty room around you.
You head for the shrine, setting a relaxed pace.
"So," the Shinigami asks after a moment, "I have to ask: what's the connection between the young lady and the leader of the wizard's little strike force?"
...
Oh, Din damn it. He WOULD have spotted that, wouldn't he?
"Did you ask the wizard about it?" you reply, following Urahara's lead in not using names, just in case the security system picks anything up.
"Almost as soon as I saw her face in that scrying globe he called up."
"Ah-ha!" you declare. "I knew he was watching that!"
"Her mother is either going to get a kick out of the Bond Villain theme she had going or insist on acting lessons," your Shadow notes.
"...not both?" you suggest.
"...yeah, probably both," he admits after a moment, before shaking his head. "On a related note, watching somebody talk to a person who's under Mind Blank is kind of... awkward."
"Like seeing them talking to an invisible friend?" you guess.
"Only you can tell that, from the way their eyes are tracking something instead of just looking in a given direction, the invisible friend is genuinely THERE and doing things you can't see or hear," he agrees. "Which is kind of frustrating, particularly after all the success we've had spying on people, places, and things that way."
You can see it. You also wonder if your family and friends have experienced similar issues when you've been talking to Briar. Even those who can perceive her NOW couldn't always do so.
Getting back to Urahara's inquiry, though... "Well, if the wizard didn't say anything on the subject" - you pause and glance at your Dark Self, who shakes his head - "then professional courtesy compels me not to reveal the truth, either."
"Arcane solidarity, huh?"
"A little, but also, I don't want the old man making a nuisance of himself about it."
And of course, you would rather not get into the whole "Altria is the reincarnation of King Arthur" thing. The fact that she isn't conscious of her past life means there shouldn't be anything about her situation for a Shinigami or other agent of the afterlife to take umbrage with, but it's not your secret to give away.
On a more pragmatic note, there is also a future business opportunity in that situation, because how many reincarnated legendary souls have Urahara and Tessai had a chance to directly observe? Aside from your own, that is? Not many, you would guess, and they'd almost certainly be willing to pay for the opportunity to do so. That's leverage Altria and Ambrose might need or simply want with the Shinigami shopkeepers at some point, and thus another reason for you not to say anything.
"He does seem like he could be a considerable nuisance," Urahara admits, before shrugging. "Well, I had to try."
You reach the Tower shrine a minute later, and find that luck is with you: the kami is still awake, although the light ball of light does sound tired when he greets you - or maybe that's despair at seeing a Shinigami in his Tower?
You can also hear and otherwise sense a couple of guards coming your way.
You fish out a bit of the Gold Incense and set it up in one of the available burners, leaving it unlit for the time being to avoid creating a fire hazard. The miko who has the morning duty shift can take care of it first thing tomorrow.
Urahara, Briar, and the Shadows wait patiently while you're setting up the offering, and when the two security personnel get close enough that they could speak to you in a normal tone of voice, they instead remain politely silent, giving you time to finish your business with the kami. Only when you have bowed and backed away from the shrine does one of the pair speak up.
"Thank you for not lighting the incense at this hour, sir," he says simply.
"Not a problem," you reply, as you turn to face him and his partner, noting as you do that both show signs of active magic on their persons, though neither has much in the way of talent themselves. Above average ki reserves, trained, and slightly stronger souls as a result of that, possibly trained as well. "Now, how may we be of assistance?"
There is the briefest of pauses as the guard gets a head-on look at the three of you, his gaze obviously moving from Urahara on your right to you to the Shadow on your left. Due to the lateness of the hour, most of the Tower's internal lights have been switched off or at least turned down, and while there's a great deal of light coming from the city below, the distance and angles involved have left the interior of the skybox a bit gloomy. Combine the reduced illumination with the distance between you and the guards and the fact that you all had your backs turned to them, and the man would only have been able to see that the three human-sized members of your party were all dressed similarly, without seeing just how far that likeness went. Depending on how well he can distinguish colors in low-light conditions, he may have missed the apparent color-coded nature of your outfits entirely.
"Well, first," the guard says, recovering, "I welcome you to the Tokyo Tower this fine evening, or morning, as you prefer. And second, I think I need to ask if there is a convention or private party scheduled that I've forgotten about..."
Heh.
"Nothing like that," Urahara assures the man, even as the second guard gets out a notepad and flips through it with a frown. "I'm just passing through on my way home from a trip, and my associates here are my ride."
"Ah. Your name, if I may?" the guard inquires in a more official tone, while his partner readies a pencil.
"Urahara Kisuke," the shopkeeper replies without hesitation. "Resident of Karakura Town and proprietor of Urahara Shop and its many fine wares!"
...is he actually taking this opportunity to advertise? You aren't sure if you should be impressed by his mercantile opportunism or concerned that he's deliberately leaving a trail.
"And you, sir?" the lead guard continues, turning to you.
There is also the matter of your place of departure...
"I am Associate Here," you reply cheerfully, before gesturing to your Shadow. "And this is Associate There."
"And if my partner had been able to come along," Urahara says, "we'd have an associate square."
You think that would rhyme if you'd said all of that in English. Alas, it doesn't work so well in Japanese.
The two security personnel regard you for a moment, then trade speaking glances with one another and sigh in shared resignation, clearly thinking that it's too late at night and/or early in the morning for this sort of thing. Even so, the one with the notepad goes ahead and writes those names down.
"And your region of origin?" the one doing the talking asks, admirably managing not to let the exasperation he's feeling over your response enter his tone.
You were tempted to tell him you came from the British Empire, but the display of professional patience earns a bit of forbearance on your side, and so instead you admit to, "Great Britain."
There is a scratch as the pencil goes awry.
"I'm... sorry," the lead gentleman says slowly. "Would that be 'Great Britain' as in England? In Europe?"
"...is there another?" you wonder.
"I was hoping-" The guard catches himself. "That is, you teleported all that way? Just the three of you?"
Urahara raises one hand. "Again, I was just a passenger, or luggage, depending on how you define it."
"Likewise," you admit easily.
Both guards' heads turn slowly to Shadow Alex.
"Yes?" he asks politely.
...
The lead guard wets his lips and then manages to say, "Do you have anything to declare?"
"Please not 'invasion'," his partner adds in an undertone, before flinching as everybody - his co-worker included - looks his way.
"...do you get people declaring invasions a lot?" your Dark Self wonders.
"We... have had some characters come through, on occasion," the first agent sighs.
You can only imagine.
...well, no, that's a lie. You're technically already responsible for a bunch of such "characters" showing up in this place, even if none of the Shinigami, knights, or wizard actually declared an invasion at the time - and you're quite certain some of them WOULD have, if they'd known it was an option.
"Well," Urahara says lightly, "we can put your minds at ease on that account. I've got this." He points at the Grey Ioun Stone that's been orbiting his head all this time. "And also these," he adds, pulling his other trades and purchases of the day out of his pockets - not counting the stuff that you took and mean to sell or trade to him and Tessai later, of course.
As for yourself...
"Nothing to declare." Magical customs do not interest you, and it's not like they can force you to tell them.
Although you are a little tempted to announce how much the stuff you have Bagged and pocketed is worth, just so that you can see the looks on these guys' faces, you aren't particularly keen on the possibility of having to physically go through everything - and you're decidedly UN-interested in the prospect of paying taxes on your loot.
You're also... somewhat certain that you don't actually have to declare anything if you're not bringing it into the country for sale or exchange. You could be wrong about that, and you should probably check up on the matter before you find yourself in a customs agent's sights while carrying a large amount of wealth and valuable items in the future.
Not that these gentlemen can FORCE you to do anything, but it's the principle of the thing.
...exactly WHICH principle is open to debate, mind. The Ganondorfy corner of your mind offers up a Gerudo proverb about a bandit falling for traps that a merchant would avoid, which... probably lost something in the translation to Hyrulean. Still, you think it's a cultural admonition about knowing the territory you're going to be working in, from the actual landscape to the people that inhabit it to the laws they live by.
Another saying advises that the difference between a hanged horse thief and a successful horse-trader is knowing who you stole the horse from.
...
You've noticed a trend in Gerudo wisdoms.
Gained Criminal (?) E (Plus) (Plus)
The two guards nod, accepting your reply and noting it down at face value.
Urahara's outward expression doesn't change a whit, but the sense of disappointed anticipation you pick up tells you that you weren't the only one thinking about how these fellows would have reacted to suddenly being responsible for dealing with millions' worth of magic items.
"And do you have any business in Japan?" the lead guard continues.
"Only dropping off Urahara, here," Shadow Alex replies. "On that note, we should be on our way." He glances at the Shinigami. "Did you want a lift back to Karakura, or...?"
"It's probably for the best that I make my own way back," Urahara replies. "Apart from reassuring these fine gentlemen that you really are just passing through, I would rather not land in town in the middle of the night."
"Why not?" the lead guard inquires, sounding puzzled.
"Karakura's got a problem with ghosts," his partner advises him. "Of the homicidal sort, at that."
"...what, seriously?"
Six out of seven heads nod as one, even though the guards can't see the fairies joining in.
"Why am I just now hearing about this?" the man wonders.
"Probably because we don't get direct magical traffic in or out of Karakura," his partner offers.
The Briars chuckle.
You resist the urge to glance at any of your traveling companions.
"And since it never comes up," the note-taker continues, "obviously the paper-pushers decided it can't be important enough to merit a page in the official handbook."
At that, Urahara allows himself a sigh. "Ah, the wonders of bureaucracy."
For a moment, he and the guards wear identical expressions.
Then the leader asks his partner, "But you know about this, because...?"
"I heard it from a cousin, who visited some friends in the area last summer and came back with some stories about why the place wouldn't be a great vacation destination."
"As both a long-term resident of Karakura and a member in good standing of the Karakura Chamber of Commerce, I feel obliged to speak in defense of the city and its tourism industry," Urahara notes.
"What about its 'cause of death: unknown' rate?"
"Adventure, sir!"
Shadow Alex looks at you and makes a vaguely magical gesture with one hand.
While you are a bit (morbidly) curious to see how this discussion about vacationing in Karakura unfolds, it's probably for the best that you be on your way. You signal back to Shadow Alex to make ready to leave, and while he's focusing his energies, you look to the customs agent not currently arguing with Urahara, gesturing between your selves and then off into the distance.
He nods, not quite bowing, and waves for you to be on your way.
You return the almost-bow-
!
-and then you're back in California, wincing at the sudden shift from "somewhere past midnight" to "maybe eight-thirty in the morning," and how that affects the ambient lighting.
You're not at the gas station this time, your Shadow having chosen to drop you off in that little bowl where you once ran some tests in a Private Sanctum and then sicced an illusionary zombie on some nosy teenagers. The tire tracks from that particular incident have been swept away by the elements, and there's nobody around to see your arrival.
"Why here?" you wonder.
"Your Mind Blank is running low, right? And your mana is tanked, besides. I figured this was as good a place as any to work a ritual casting."
Eh, your Mind Blank would have lasted another hour, which is more than enough time for you to have gotten home, set up a Mirror Hideaway, and do the ritual in there, but this is fine, too.
Your Dark Self raises a Private Sanctum so that your ninth-circle ritual doesn't set off alarm bells in town, and then takes advantage of the local energies himself to cast a Spell of Adjustable Disguise over the two of you.
From there, you head home-
"Watcha got there, Alex?"
-shoo Zelda away from your massive collection of new shiny stuff, and then spend a few minutes looking around at your basement workshop, comparing its dimensions and current contents to the amount of loot in your Bags of Holding.
There's NO way you're going to be able to fit all of that stuff in here, is there? Not even a significant portion of it, at least not without crowding a lot of things together and risking contamination of your spell reagents or unwanted interactions between active enchantments.
If you had more mana left, you might be able to work something out with extra-dimensional spaces, like an Extended Rope Trick... but thinking on it, that wouldn't be safe. Jugram Haschwalth is unlikely to stop looking for you(r Shadow) or his people's stolen treasures for a while yet, and the space created by a Rope Trick allows those inside to see out into the surrounding area. Combined with the fact that your household wards are almost certainly not up to the task of keeping Yhwach's Almighty eyes from seeing past them, you'd be best served by keeping as much of the Silbern loot as possible either on your person or in the Bags of Holding.
Items that you keep with you will, of course, be protected by your habitual use of the Spell of Mind Blank. Stuff that you leave in the Bags might still be "located" by the Grandmaster, but all he should see then would be that the item(s) in question were stashed in some dark space along with a bunch of other stuff. The Bags themselves aren't see-through in either direction, as long as they aren't open, so where the Bags are and who or what is outside of them should remain a mystery to the Wandenreich's leader.
You, your Shadow, and the Briars still spend a couple of hours sorting out what you can.
Is there anything in your pile of magical loot that you want to add to your personal inventory on a permanent basis?
And is there anything else that urgently needs doing, in relation to your loot?
You run through the list of loot and pick out about a dozen different items that would either be useful in general or very useful in specific situations that you're more likely to encounter than the average nine-year-old.
Granted, you doubt there's a nine-year-old alive who hasn't ended up in a dark or at least scarily shadowed room at least once, but MOST of those wouldn't have had to worry about any monsters beyond the ones conjured by their own imaginations - and no sooner have you had that thought than you realize it can be interpreted in a couple of very depressing ways.
This planet, sometimes...
Setting aside your profound disappointment with the shape of the universe, a few of the items you've picked out are things you could wear as part of your regular attire without drawing attention to them or yourself, and that without any need for additional magic - although if you pick one of the necklaces, you might have to remember to wear heavier shirts and keep the pendant tucked away inside.
Do you wish to don any of these items on a regular basis going forward?
You spend the rest of the day and most of the following Monday refraining from serious magical exertion, so as to allow your mana reserve to build back up. That isn't to say that you completely abstain from spellcasting, but most of what you do on Monday is call up Shadow Alex and accompany him into your Mirror Hideaway, each of you carrying an Arcane Pocket-full of magical items for basic analysis. He handles the spells required, and while you don't get any ground-shaking insights into the process of crafting these items, you at least confirm everything they're supposed to do.
Most of them, anyway. How well you understand the intended purposes of the more seriously damaged pieces is admittedly questionable.
The following day, you wake up fully rested-
Gained Mana Recovery D (Plus) (Plus)
-and promptly burn a chunk of that replenished energy in your workshop, pushing along with the Circle of Mortal Summoning. Fortunately, since it's summer, you have a lot more time you can put towards item-crafting than you would during the school year, which allows you to make serious progress on the project over the course of the week.
You had some Reasonable Concerns about handing an item capable of summoning mostly helpless mortals to the domain of a half-Fae half-Vire sorceress, and came up with a few safeguards to try and limit the Circle from being abused.
La Renarde's Belt is pretty much a no-brainer addition to your daily wear, thanks to its low-profile design. Hong's Belt of Physical Might would have been even better in terms of physical benefits, but the golden sunburst dripping with a rainbow of jewels would have drawn FAR too much attention without some sort of disguise spell, and is honestly just too embarrassingly tacky even with that option.
Deciding which of your new magic necklaces to wear was also a pretty easy choice, as while you've never been seriously sick, you're technically getting exposed to diseases every day - as the last cold and flu season amply demonstrated, what with the whole school at least getting the sniffles over the course of a couple of weeks. Add in the fact that you travel to other continents on a regular basis and interact with members of species that modern medicine doesn't even acknowledge the existence of, and it really does make a lot of sense for you to take precautions against catching anything and/or carrying it back to Sunnydale.
You don't know if there's anything like a "vampire flu" or a "fox pox" out there, but you do NOT want to find out by being the vector for an outbreak in Sunnydale. That's a scenario that just has "epidemic" written all over it.
One last inventory-related note: how MANY of the Ropes of Binding did you intend to pocket?
Three uses per day feels like an appropriate amount for the Circle. It's not the freedom (or risk) of unlimited uses, but neither is it the sheer stingy rules-lawyering of a single use per day. There's also the symbolism of the number to consider, particularly in light of the connections to Hyrule that you and Vira both have.
Locking the item so that it only responds to wielders of sorcery is also a reasonable security precaution, as it will allow Vira - and you yourself - to use the thing without issue, while preventing any visitors or batty minions that might be feeling too curious for their own good from messing around with it, or at least from getting RESULTS out of doing so.
The sacrificial value of these limitations significantly simplifies the crafting process - the restriction on daily uses more so than the one for who can make the Circle work - and combined with the work you'd already done, you could have the thing finished and ready for-nter-planar postal delivery before you leave for your "summer school of martial arts" trip with Lu-sensei.
That is, of course, unless there were any additional functions you wished to include? It's currently "just" a combination of the Spells of Magic Circle and Lesser Planar Binding, which is all Vira required and requested.
While you haven't had many opportunities to take prisoners or grab vast amounts of treasure in the past, much less secure them, your Shadow did both during the Silbern Raid. Under the circumstances, you don't see how he could have safely secured Bambietta without using as much magic as he did - the matter-to-spirit conversion process of traveling to the Spirit Plane would turn any physical binding into something a Quincy could break down and use for ammunition in short order - but some of the packing choices made by his Earth Elemental looting squad, while certainly demonstrating clever use of existing resources, might have been more easily done with proper ropes.
Not every potential prisoner you run into in the future is going to have such a convenient "get out of shackles easily" card to play, you ARE planning on storming at least one more magic fortress, and who can say what opportunities random chance may bring your way?
Best to be prepared in advance.
Besides, every adventurer should bring at least one good rope with them. This way, you've packed for yourself and several of your friends!
There are a number of spells that you could add to a magic item meant for use with calling spells to make things more secure: Dimensional Anchor to prevent teleportation-based escapes; Sacred Space to weaken fiends; maybe an internal Anti-Magic Field to prevent the target from employing spells.
The need for almost all of those measures is obviated by the fact that your Circle of Mortal Summoning has been designed specifically with the summoning of Hyrulean humanoids in mind, and then only of relatively weak individuals. Conventionally, teleportation spells don't become available until the fourth tier, which represents a level of magical ability that would put those who hold it just outside your creation's ability to conjure. Likewise, even among Hyrule's... diverse population, it's usually only the monsters who are particularly inconvenienced by consecrated areas.
That said, while you don't imbue such magics into the Circle, you do set it up with the necessary physical elements to serve as a focus for them, just in case Vira feels the need to be thorough in her precautions.
If nothing else, it's good to stay in practice.
One spell that you do end up including is the Spell to Shrink an Item. Due to an earnest desire not to make the half-Fae, half-Vire sorceress think that you're making light of her or your deal, you modified the magic so that the Circle doesn't turn to plush when it shrinks. The result, then, is a complex ring of base metals about the size of a big coin that can be set down and expanded into a proper summoning circle ten feet across - or a bit over nine feet in the interior circumference, which is space enough for the average adult Goron and Zora not to feel crowded, and positively roomy for Hylians and most others that might find themselves called before the Mistress of the Dark.
HAIL!
The added convenience of a portable binding circle is something Vira didn't specifically ask for, but which you think she'll appreciate - if only when she's setting the thing up in her stalactite lair - and it doesn't increase the work time or the cost of the finished product too dramatically.
Gained Circle of Mortal Summoning
Assembling a ten-foot-wide circle in your workshop took some doing, but you are rather pleased with the end result, even if you're going to have to disassemble and pack away the stands and clamps.
Out of curiosity, did you want to test out your creation before you sent it off to its intended owner?