Partner Procedure
06.6.920
Endergaln
Xander Quillwick wakes up, bound, somewhere unfamiliar, and a long-haired woman unknown to him says he should’ve talked when she asked and given him the name of the friends who gave him the stories.
Sav tries out a new trick and grants almost everyone in the workshop (except Gwin) a magical map, which links them together and permits them to know the location of one another (except Ethan, though he’s able to sense everyone else). Sav instead gets their homunculus Samakhael to follow him, since they can talk mentally up to a mile.
They decide to split up in pairs, since it might be dangerous to go alone.
Ethan and Sal head to the Orfanage to get a better description of Rhun, and then the bar where the writer disappeared to get a better description of the woman he disappeared with. Sal charms the bartender at the latter into revealing the woman’s description (fancy, cultured, long curly dark hair to the middle of her back, gold jewelry; drank an expensive liquor called Green Dragon’s Blood Ale; her name might have started with a K).
Bax and Ashen head toward Ashen’s contact, Ricken, to find out what he’s found (nothing). Ashen is certain, for some reason, that Diamante is the most suspicious. He picks up a forked twig from the ground and twigs to a known spell that could help.
Peach and Yev head toward the upscale markets, where Yev looks at women’s clothing stores, trying to find one the described woman might have frequented. He asks Peach about what happened when Xalati died; with some discomfort, Peach tells him, and says that the last thing she said was to yell Sal’s full name and give him an order he couldn’t refuse. Yev absorbs this, and says that each day Peach lives, she honors her. Peach asks about his experience, and he says he appeared much earlier than everyone else, and though he kept searching, he wasn’t welcome in many places until he came across a tribe of goliaths in the wild woods and started to get more in touch with how his ancestors may have lived. Peach tells him that even though she’d never met Mosrael and Sav before, when she saw them she felt a sense of familiarity and almost homeyness, and that he doesn’t have to be with goliaths to be among family again. Yev is glad the dreams didn’t stop, even though he often wanted them to when they first started happening, some 10-ish years ago.
Gwin and Sav continue working in the workshop, where Gwin worries about Esmund and Sav says that, even though they don’t know if other realities with different outcomes still exist (they’re apparently not crossing over any more, at least, given the lack of tears), if Esmund came from a future this world, that means that, in this future, he has to show up again to take Sav’s research and bring it back to them in their now-recent past. Sav asks how Gwin got in with Beryl, and Gwin says she stole from Beryl things she needed for her experiments, and eventually got caught; they were so impressed with her machines that they agreed not to charge her if she worked for them.
Ashen charges back to the workshop and asks if Sav knows how to locate an item; since they have the same material as Rhun’s hammer, they could just use that piece to locate the rest of the hammer. Sav is a bit dubious, but does say that they’ve been working on theories of using the efforts of a group to enhance the properties of a spell; given the already-wide range of the locating spell, it probably wouldn’t work very well to enhance that aspect, but she thinks they all could increase how long it lasts, up to eight hours.
So as to not accidentally destroy anything important if something goes wrong with working new magics for the first time, all the spellcasters (except Gwin) and Ethan relocate to the roof of Ethan’s office. Ashen leads the casting, as he knows the spell and is likeliest to be on the ground doing the footwork; Bax, Peach, Sal and Sav contribute their power.
As they share their power with Ashen, they all see a one-second flash of one another’s memories:
- Bax sees two unfamiliar, strange-looking girls, tailed and horned with blue/purple skin, being cared for by Danica
- Peach remembers a moment of connection with her mom, tall, blond, dark-skinned, being the only family they have to rely on
- Sav remembers finding her mom dead in their room one winter
- Sal knocks on Esmund’s door and asks if it’s ready, and Esmund hands over a music box, grinning
- Ashen yells for Sever on a muddy battlefield as he tears his way through ravening undead children
Ashen completes the spell, getting flashes of Ethan in the alleyway, Xander following a woman into the alley, and drawn underground, and realizes suddenly that it’s already within the spell’s range.
They rush down, into the sewers, and as they near the source send Peach and Salinger ahead to talk. Within a broader room, they find a battered Xander Quillwick tied to a chair and Rhun Enkerig and company, ready for a party:
- Camille, the woman with long curly black hair, balancing a flame above her hand;
- Valve? a halfling woman wrapped in white bandages with white hair and yellow slit eyes
- Albrecht! a man with russet hair, haunted eyes and a drawn bow
- A woman with a crossbow, curly brown hair, familiar from a painting Salinger once gave to Peach: Kaylie, once Miranda Pine’s protege of some sort.
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