The time rolls by, and eventually, Shovash finishes her ritual. It's an odd sort of invocation. There is chanting, but it is being performed in the fashion of a round, with overlapping voices cycling through a chant such that at any given moment there is a rippling susurrus in the air of jumbled tones all at a different point in the same cycle. There are diagrams, drawn in blood and skymetals and splintered light, shifting and overlapping and creating enormously complicated fractal symbology and elaborate semi-patterned arcane structures that flow and waver in ways that lines are not meant to do. The world bends until the shapes made by those diagrams stop following traditional geometric laws, the ratios and angles all wrong, such that even the fundamental constants of geometry cease to make sense. Twenty men and women, each a studied practitioner of the arcane arts, mumble and shuffle through the clouds of incense-smoke and invoke powers to tear the veil, sunder the boundaries that divide the worlds, and let this Place slip into that Notion. Some of them are bleeding from the mouth or eyes or nose. They don't seem to have noticed. Many of them are twitching and shuddering as they continue to move, to speak, to focus their minds on creating a reality that is not what this reality was made to be.

Finally, the ritual reaches a crescendo, the words no longer being spoken but rather speaking themselves, unspooling and twisting together, ripping themselves free from the throats of the men and women and others that surround her. Her assistants have a wide range of strange expressions, from terror and pain through to an ecstasy that is almost akin to religious revelation, as the magic rips itself through their bodies and souls. The air thrums once, a pure tone that sounds sublimely wrong echoing through the whole of the city, and the air shatters, and a large portion of Quantium ripples as though it is being seen through a heat haze.

When it passes, the buildings are intact, but empty. Nothing living remains in the material within this part of the city, and given that everyone was moved into it leading up to the evacuation, that means that the city is largely empty of life. No one remains within the bounds of this city, save those who came to save it, or perhaps to damn it - who is to say, really? Is there even a difference anymore, in this gods-forsaken world?

Stepping out onto the sand, you find the rainstorm has not slowed, not slackened at all. The streets, where they are not cobbled, are thoroughly dampened sand. Something feels...wrong. The world hums with power intense enough that even those not practiced in the magical arts can feel something building. But this is not the power of a ritual, not even one as intense and overpowering as the working Shovash just wrought. This is something far, far less...civilized than that. This is raw power, unbound by logic or structure or anything that you could even recognize as a mind. This is intent made manifest, backed by the kind of raw willpower that lies beneath such phrases as "let there be light."

And old. So old.

The power building in the air spikes only moments later, and five days and one hour after the previous Primordial broke through into your reality, you feel the world itself strain...and tear. And the sand starts to shift and flow around you. It moves and flows in ways that are not remotely natural, defying all the laws of the material world to move in directions that are not rational or sane or orderly. The movements never quite form patterns, but rather shift and mesh and clash in ways that seem always right on the edge of establishing orderly procession. You get the distinct feeling that if you saw it from above, if you could witness and parse the whole of the motions now being conducted by the sands, you would see a system so immense and complex and almost-patterned that you could lose yourself utterly in it, and forget that you were ever something so small as a person.

There is more sand than there should be. Some of it looks like it should, like natural sand in a natural desert in a natural world. But other sections, other grains, are strange, blurred and crystalline and seeming almost to flicker in and out of sight. Increasingly, the world around you is looking blurred and flickery, as though existence is being forced to continually adjust itself to cope with the Presence now forcing itself upon your world. You get the distinct sense that reality was simply not meant to handle the pressure of the being now pushing itself into it. The sand continues to move, flowing upwards in swirling streams that dissolve back into the whole. The motion stops for just a moment, and then begins again, but now it has focus, and those almost-random movements are beginning to ablate away at everything in this city - blasting the buildings, the streets, everything around them with particles of blurry almost-sand that start to shred and tear at everything. The natural sand is only as effective as a sandblaster, but those crystalline particles are tearing into stone like it is tissue paper, peeling away tiny slices of the city with every arcing movement through the air. The process is silent save for a soft hissing sound, a whisper almost, of sand gliding over and through stone, wood, and metal.

Ragnar looks around at the swirling sandstorm, futilely searching for something he can put a bolt into. Greta vibrates in his arms with a similarly palpable level of frustration - they have one purpose in this world, and one method of accomplishing that goal. In battle they are a single being of two souls, but without a foe to target their will means little.

"Show yourself to us, Small Made Large! Show yourself, so that we know what we stand united against! Show yourself, so that we may end you!"

He flickers in and out of view like an apprentice wizard's illusion, not fully taking hold of the fey-thorns but unable to remain still enough to stay visible in his frustration. With no apparent answer coming from the Primordial, he fires off a series of bolts in random upward directions.


OOC:
Full Attack w/ Rapid Shot+Haste at the 'storm'.
Hit AC61, Confirm 57, for 74+25=99 damage
Hit AC54 for 96 damage
Hit AC52 for 83 damage
Hit AC45 for 85 damage
Hit AC39 for 83 damage.

As Small Made Large finally makes itself manifest, Tolben intones a single terrible word - hastened by the mysterious powers learned from the Primordials. A tremendous glow heralds the appearance of a powerful angelic being - a Trumpet Archon.

Tolben orders the Archon to accept his next spell, then withdraw to a short distance and heal if necessary. This spell is less impressive, but ensures that harm coming to him will be split with the Archon.

Finally, his form flickers and is replaced by a huge crystalline dragon - several, in fact, as his Mirror Image adapts to the effect. The calm of his speech is ill-fitting with the fierceness of a dragon's jaws.

"Come, Primordial. It is time for your dissection."

Active effects:

---

Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)

Mind Blank
Mage Armor
Greater False Life (2d10+20 temporary hp) (31)
Overland Flight
Moment of Prescience

Short term:
Control Weather (rain),
Shapechange,
Spell Turning,
Winds of Vengeance,
True Seeing,
Mirror Image

Rounds/level:
Summon Monster IX
Unwilling Shield

---

When Small Made Large arrives, Damien simply floats in midair for a second, his form crackling with energy but his face showing nothing but confusion. "The hell is this?" He asks dumbly after a few seconds, "Some kind of like... massive... sand elemental? Or something? What am I even supposed to blow up?"

  When the ritual is complete, Shovash stands alone in the chamber. The working had been done in the center of the affected quarter, and the spell she gave her mephit to cast when it returned only excluded the two of them. She isn't entirely sure whether the arcanists were expecting that, but their professionalism is hardly her concern, now. Beside which, it would keep them from being present for the battle while spell-blighted. She isn't sure whether they were expecting that either, really. The black cabochon embedded in the skin over her breastbone is colorless now, but otherwise? Shovash was the conductor, not an instrument. And a good thing, too, she thinks, stepping out just as the world is torn open for the second time in five minutes.

  "Tolben!  What do you make—"  But Tolben is already in the middle of answering the question she started to ask.  It gives her pause—several seconds of pause, in fact.  "He's going to dissect a sandstorm...." she mutters quietly to herself, beginning to look confused.  It turns to suspicious wariness when Ragnar screams at the sky and launches a flurry of bolts into open air.  That's reason to take a better look around, and maybe to make haste away from whatever has seized her companions' minds.

  She spreads her wings overhead and vaults aloft.  It will probably be safer away from the specks of warp, or at least away from the people unaccustomed to flexible physical laws.  She picks a street intersection below her, as she ascends, and wrenches the rules of the Ethereal in through the already-frayed Boundary, just to test the waters.  So to speak.

Dropping a Condensed Ether in an area where the sand is moving as erratically as can be spotted.  Also heading 90' up and away from the firing range.
Active spells: Greater heroism, Blur, Haste, Bull's strength, Moment of greatness.
This message was last edited by the player at 08:10, Wed 29 July 2020.

Dharmesh observed the sandstorm forming idly, the slow spin of the dust that now comprised his body seemingly matching the not-quite patterns of the sand slowly grinding the empty city away. It was inconsequential at this point, far less relevant than the Presence he could sense, so far removed from anything he had yet felt that it felt almost like an insult to call it merely a mind.
As the others issued their declarations and their threats, Dharmesh knew the Thing before them would not answer such demands for attention, assuming it even noticed them. Instead, he reached out, extending his awareness towards this alien thing, knocking on the metaphorical door, so to speak. Hello Small Made Large, what has brought you here? I have to say, you are the first of your kind to truly fascinate me. Tell me, how did you transcend the physicality that held your prior siblings? Did flesh ever constrain you at all?

Pre-casting Heroism, Hermean Potential, Mirror Image and Dust Form. Attempting telepathic communication with the Primordial, which I'm certain is a fantastic idea.
Number of images on me at present is 8. Will save result is 57. 4 uses of HP remain.

The Primordial continues to force more and more of itself through into the Material world. Existence seems to bend and shiver with anticipation. Where it overlaps with one's body, the effect is...intensely peculiar, a sort of quivering feeling deep within as though the matter that makes up one's body is aching to be something, somewhere, different. Angles bend and shift without warning before snapping back to something resembling what they are supposed to be.

The sand itself seems to take little notice of what is happening around it. Even the bolts that soar into the midst of the storm do not seem to really...do anything. A particularly keen-eyed observer might note that even when one of the bolts impacts one of those otherworldly grains of sand, the result is a bolt with a tiny path carved through it by that strange particle.

It's only when Dharmesh attempts to mentally communicate with it that the Primordial...speaks, if such is the word. There are no words, or sounds. But suddenly, raw conceptual forms are roughly pressed into your minds. The thoughtforms are unfiltered and you get the strong impression that they are just as overwhelmingly subdivided and nuanced as the Primordial's own actions in this city, as filled with hypnotic almost-patterns as the streets of Quantium. It flings one such form after another into your mind, too rapidly for comfort, leaving those minds to attempt to press them into a form that has meaning. Concepts are translated into words, with the awareness that much has been lost in the process.

The whole thing takes only moments and leaves behind a sort of structured verse, reconstructed out of the raw concepts that you received:

To begin, a fracture.
 An infinity, partitioned.
  A reality, potentiated.
 A frustration, acknowledged.
  A tool, created.
   A spiral, begun.
  A strain, observed.
   In seeing, tension.
    A solution, determined.
 A transgression, witnessed.
  A tool, cast away.
   A promise, shattered.
  The greatest, betrayed.
   The eldest, confined.
    The remnant, surrendered.
   A memory, forgotten.
    A rage, consuming.
     A choice, made.
    To visit, a reckoning.
     What once served, to rebel.
      An opportunity, awaited.
     Existence, to tremble.
      Sorrow, to reap.
       Anguish, to remember.
      A cage, weakened.
       A possibility, seized.
        To conclude, a fracture.


The sands lash out at you, seeming to be more focused now - an intention to harm, an awareness of your presence. The simple sand does not seem to be doing any particular harm. But the blurred, almost-real crystalline grains are far more damaging, seeming almost to glide straight through everything from flesh and cloth to armor, leaving behind tunnels.

With one of his only means of doing harm proven ineffective, Ragnar falls back on his second option - information. Instead of continuing to bombard the sand with bolts, he shoots upward, seeking a ceiling to the storm. Perhaps from above, he can discern a pattern of some kind in its movements. Patterns are predictable,and predictability is a vulnerability. It was a rule he had long lived by, and had yet to find proven wrong. The phantom thorns sink into his flesh as he flies, jealous in their possessiveness. Ragnar's pain is that of the First World to deliver, not some outdated sapient concept.

(Run action 360ft. upward, engage Greater Invisibility 1/20)
This message was last edited by the player at 20:14, Sat 08 Aug 2020.

  And there it is, at long last. An answer. It comes incomplete, in words stretched nearly to breaking to contain more than they should. But then why not more words? An intellectual might pull back to analyze the message from multiple outside vantages. Anyone with their wits intact and a healthy sense of self-preservation might at least leave the affected area. But Shovash is an intuitive, a shaman, and kind of a freak. She lands on top of the tallest building in easy reach, flickers out of sight, and reappears atop the tallest building the storm covers, twice her usual size with wings and arms spread to the sky.

  Because more than those other things, if less advertised, Shovash is permeable. She doesn't try to find more words to fill the gaps, because she is busy feeling the message. It folds, reflects, refracts: there could be no more words because the understanding that spoke was a thing of structure, not vocabulary. And she knows this only by accepting it as her own voice. She loves poetic justice, and vengeance, and nested meanings. It all fits, right into place, all coordinated at once.

  So she prepares to address it in kind, because even giddy and incapable of fear do not sum to careless. Again, she severs the Boundary where it has no seam, only correspondence, and while the wound draws itself back together again, there is more magic, of a less primal sort. And then she spreads her wings and arms to the sky and lets the invader in.

Step one here is making sure communing with a Primordial doesn't get her killed. Five rounds of time stop means laying on hands first thing. Then she's going to make herself particulate. Then larger. Then she's casting Unholy Aura and selecting the Primordial as an ally. And then it's Unnatural Lust—on herself. Throwing the save.
This message was last edited by the player at 20:16, Mon 10 Aug 2020.

As more and more of the Primordial arrives, Tolben speaks in his glassy draconic voice.

"Still crossing the planar boundary? Let's see how you feel about... resistance."

He may hold back only a few grains of its vast being, but that alone will tell him something. Then, the Primordial begins to "speak", and he turns his mind to the new problem.

One of the fundamental problems with experimental research is that to observe something is to change it. So it is with the Primordial's "verse". Conceptual information, in the confines of a mortal mind, decay swiftly into words.

Of course, if there is no observer, that decay need not take place. As the concepts begin to decay, Tolben empties his mind - leaving the crystal clarity of absence for the Primordial's speech to take place in.

His heart beats, and the moment is over. He cannot spare the time to analyse the thought-sample he collected, but merely shoves it into his prodigious memory. Perhaps later he will gain some insight into the meanings; for now, he has not even heard the words.

Finally, he turns to the more immediate problem - stopping Small Made Large in its tracks. Its dust barely seems to have scratched him, though his angelic protector is horribly affected. He responds by targeting a seemingly empty space with Mage's Disjunction. After all, the grains are not entirely real - and so might be affected. And if there is any link joining the collective, the backlash from cutting some off might well wound the whole.

Actions:

---

Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)

Uses Steward of the Great Beyond to try and veto the Primordial bringing more of itself into the Material Plane.

Casts Mage's Disjunction, affecting a 40ft burst where no one is, but where some of the Primordial's own sand can be seen.

I'm not sure what kind of action it would be to empty his mind, trying to collect the fragmented concepts behind the Primordial's speech rather than the mere words, but I've left open the option of taking an extra standard with Amazing Initiative.

---

As Small Made Large tells its story, Damien continues his confused floating and simply soaks in the experience as it washes over him. As it ends, he looks at the sandstorm differently for a moment, wondering at the meaning, at the story behind the concepts pressed against his mind. This proves to his detriment, as the sandstorm also looks at him differently, the sands enveloping him and piercing his flesh repeatedly. The blood that flows from the wounds seems different somehow, though, glimmers of flame and lightning visible impossibly inside the droplets. Beatrice, for her part, simply takes off from Damien's shoulder before the storm hits and manages to dodge every one of the strange, ethereal grains gracefully.

Shocked back into action by the sudden pain, Damien finally begins casting spells, forcibly bringing time to a complete halt and, spying a major thoroughfare of the city nearby, flies along it summoning a massive wall glimmering with a dizzying display of colour and light along its length, right in the path of the storm.

---

Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
Flying along the nearest road while doing standard Damien nova for 17 CL 26 prismatic walls. 50 feet high by 1768 feet long wall.

---

As Dharmesh recovered from the experience of bearing witness to such an alien mind, he began to turn over the easier to process nodes of information, quickly working out a response even as the others attempted to harm it, projecting his response telepathically. You may try to subsume me, but I will not go gently, I promise that. You hold no malice against this place, merely what it represents. Show me the object of your hate, why can you not take your revenge directly?

ooc: Rolling Diplomacy to try and follow this thread, result is 44.

Creation shudders, twitches, and shakes, both from Small Made Large's inherent effects as it manifests, and from the prodigious amount of magic being poured out into the area. Time is rent and rewoven. Tolben attempts to hold the boundary against its arrival, but finds his power matched and exceeded, the bulwark swept away. The disjunction cast against the sands has more of an effect - the shuddering of reality stops momentarily, the flow of the strange particles briefly falls in line with ordinary patterns and directions. But ultimately, little more happens - if these particles are the manifestation of a magic, it is one stronger than even a disjoining. The particles that pass through Damien's great wall of light are reduced - either scorched away by the elemental powers at work, or cast out into other planes of reality. But there are always more of the unnatural particles breaking forth.




Another 36 swarm damage to everyone still in the storm.
This message was last edited by the GM at 21:41, Fri 14 Aug 2020.

  Shovash laughs.  Shovash laughs.  Shovash damn near cracks a rib laughing, up there playing gargoyle on that tower.  She has contact.  And on the terms she had set.  She lowers her hands and releases the centipede from her locket; it crawls down into the rolling grains of her flesh and vanishes inside her.  She has contact.  It's almost too exciting to be real.  "Let's hope poetry translates both ways."

---

Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
  'In a people, fear, a child
The child, a woman, betrayed
In betrayal, claimed, a lesson
The lesson, as pain, power

  The People, in power, weakness
Their weakness, a lust, the woman's
The woman, a child, empowered
The power, of horror, lust

  The mighty, to conquer, sacrifice
For sacrifice, a child, the victor
Victory, squandered, in faith
The faithless, the mighty, to raise'

---

  Below her, the hum of half an acre of magical barriers springing up at once sounds impossibly distant.
This message was last edited by the player at 07:02, Fri 21 Aug 2020.

Again, Tolben scarcely flinches at the pain of the storm. This time, though, he abandons his draconic form to return to his normal shape.

"The connection is clear. A part is the whole, and the whole is each single mote. But to use that connection... strength or subtlety? I must disrupt the pattern somehow."

His summoned archon looks much the worse for wear, bloody trails through its angelic flesh. With a brief order, it begins to cast a powerful area healing spell.

Meanwhile, Tolben works his own magic. He taps deeply into his Primordial-derived well, reinforcing his second attempt at unravelling Small Made Large. This is followed by a more conventional spell which brings forth an eerie mist. Both spells cover areas occupied only by dancing motes.

---

Spoiler text: (Highlight or hover over the text to view)
Spells:
Trumpet Archon: Mass Cure Serious Wounds (CL 14)
Tolben:
Arcane Surge to cast Mythic Disjunction. (net cost 2 Mythic Power)
Standard to cast Mind Fog (DC 33).

---

Ragnar drifts sideways, skimming the top of the storm without firing down into it.

Damien floats for a moment behind his wall, panting slightly from the strain and admiring the sparkling colours and constant zapping sounds as millions of grains of sand and not-sand are either destroyed or cast off into another plane at random by the wall. He quickly realizes, however, that many of the weird grains are managing to pass through his creation, and even its vast size isn't enough to stand in the way of the ever growing sandstorm. "More magic, Damien," whispers Beatrice in his ear. "You simply need to throw more magic at this, no problem can't be solved by sufficient destruction." He nods at her words and floats up above the wall, summoning acid and fire in his hands as he does. Once he reaches the top, he blasts a pair of tsunamis out into the storm, one a roiling green wave of pure acid and the other a flood of white hot flames.

A wave of fire and a wave of acid crash out, pouring through the streets in a flood of raw elemental power. Buildings are shattered under the force, and even the streets are torn up, cracked, and eaten away. What results is a large swathe of destruction, the city torn apart. The rubble is still smoking when another thought transmits itself into your minds. This one is much simpler, nearly something that can be put entirely into words.

A consideration, completed.
 A decision, made.
  A token, provided.

The sand falls still to the ground in an instant. The blurred particles are still there, still looking very much like artifacts of another sort of existence entirely, but they are not moving. And a heartbeat later, you feel power surging through the bones of the world. As with the previous Primordials, you can feel the magnitude of the mind and the power here, sufficient that even the shards of it you instinctively grasp after are such as most mortals will never even consider the possibility of holding.






As you look around, you see a young adult woman jump to her feet on a nearby rooftop, not far from Ragnar. She is heavily veiled and wearing a black evening dress entirely inappropriate to the current situation on several levels. She waves her arms back and forth, clearly trying to attract attention. "Yoohoo! Powerful types, over here! Got a message for you!" she shouts.

Tolben ignores the irrelevant young woman for now. He has more important concerns.

"As I thought. All things will be unwrought, even the Primordials."

His excited demeanour and loud voice belie the apparent equanimity of the words. Quickly he floats down to a patch of ground - a perfect circle eighty feet across, containing not a single mote of Small Made Large. He puts a handful of completely ordinary sand in a bag to send to Valdr; this is what passes for gloating, between the two.

Only then does he turn to the very distracting lady. His gaze is one which sees the patterns of her being - and just how fragile those patterns are.

"Yes?"

As the presence of Small Made Large receded, Dharmesh looked around, taking in the wealth of information he was now privy to. The doubtlessly vast damage done to his mind by his communication would have to be examined later. As he studied his surroundings and the others, he extended a tendril of thought towards Tolben even as he turned to face this newcomer. "I do not think it was defeated, so much as it decided to leave. I compared it's actions here to those of Mengkare, and in return I was given the impression it intends to observe and learn more before going forward. This will not be the last we see of Small Made Large
He did not respond to the woman's call, preferring instead to observe for the time being.

Damien recovers almost instantly from his death-like experience, letting out a loud whoop at Small Made Large's apparent defeat. The elemental energy he now sees coursing through everything, especially himself, holds his attention for a brief moment before the woman calls out and distracts him. He immediately teleports up to her rooftop and gives her an odd look, saying, "Lucky for you I didn't vaporize this specific building. What's your message?"

  Shovash is still up on that balcony when she hears the call, and she takes her time stretching her wings while the holes in them fill back in.  But then she leaps into the air and seems to cross the entire distance with one great wing-beat. Her body flows through itself rather than twist for a remarkably gentle landing between. Damien and the stranger.

"Whatever he said, I'm sorry for that. He gets like this whenever we let him out of the crate. What is your message, little miss?" She looks back over a shoulder to wink at the suspended detonation behind her before stepping a bit closer to the messenger. Her much more revealing dress pours out of its own seams until the cut matches the other woman's, though it remains stitched together from furs. "And why come while the sun is high? What could not wait a few hours?"
This message was last edited by the player at 04:41, Sat 22 Aug 2020.

"You're so bloody hard to find is why I didn't come another time," the woman grumbles. "Right, so I'm supposed to say this exactly, please don't interrupt or I might lose my place. Ahem." She pulls a scroll of what looks like paper-thin silver out of her sleeve, unrolls it, and begins to read in what is clearly an intentionally overdramatic voice.

"Greetings and salutations from the Keeper of the House of Seasons to the Liege-Protectors of the Material Plane,

I wish, first, to extend you a warm and salubrious welcome to the grand stage, somewhat belated. You are certainly proving the stake you have claimed, most effectively, upon your world, and I remain confident in your capacity to continue to do so. I wish you the finest of luck in your endeavors to quiet the Primordial beings of your world once more, and most sincrely hope that you are able to continue to keep losses of your people to a minimum. With luck and perhaps a dash of, dare I say it, faith, you will assuredly make your mark on the great game for years to come. I look forward to establishing a healthy and happy relationship with you all, from My House to yours, et cetera and ad nauseum, fiat.

Unfortunately, I cannot say that merely extending greetings is the sole Purpose of this message. It is a sad fact that politeness is often an afterthought rather than a mainstay, and I am sorry to report that this is the case here as well. You see, Count Ranalc is back in black, our very own snake in the grass. Not only that, but he has, by means I prefer not to disclose, stolen a Season from the House of Seasons that I do maintain for its owner. It has come to my attention that his agent has brought it to your world. And so, I am sorry to say, should he go unimpeded, the area of your world that he chooses to focus on will not have the Season of Harvest to follow the heat of the year. Rather, it will experience the Season of Ravening Shadows.

Now, as the name might perchance suggest unto you, this Season would be most inimical to the normal function of your world. Unless he chooses to deploy it in the Land of the Midnight Lord, I suppose, in which case it would likely go largely unnoticed. Anywhere else, though, and My guess is that you will see serious harm done by this Season.

Ordinarily, this would be no business of yours, and would be Mine own situation to address. However, there is a complication. You see, My agents are relatively thin on the metaphorical ground in your world. Ordinarily, in such a matter, I would turn to the agreements of mutual support between Myself and the Most Illustrious Keeper of the First Vault. Perhaps, all things considered, also the Lord of Midnight. However, this is not possible now, naturally.

As ancient law and custom of the fey decree, by preventing these Respected Personages from carrying out the terms of their agreeements, you declare and affirm that you shall be responsible for those oaths yourself, in their absence. Thus, pursuant to the terms of the ancient and avowed treaty between the House of Seasons and the First Vault, I am delivering unto you a notification that the situation exists and a request that you deal with it as you shall see fit, provided only that the Season of Ravening Shadows be returned to its ancient place. My Emissary, who stands before you now, shall provide such limited assistance as she is able, in a gesture of good faith.

It is my hope that, aside from the obvious practical requirements aforementioned that you deal with it for both reasons of immediate self-interest and oath, you shall see the benefit to be had in establishing a postive working relationship between your own new-formed Pantheon and that of the Eldest of the Fey. I hope that your enlightened decision shall find that starting out, as it were, on the proper footing will reap great benefits in the future, when you have need of assistance in some matter of the First World and Her children.

On behalf of the House of Seasons and the Eldest of the First World,
Ng the Hooded"

The Emissary, as she was referred to, rolls the scroll back up and returns it to her sleeve. She then bows in your direction. "As the message said, I am at your disposal, within limits, for the time and only the time required to recover the Season specified in this message, or three days' time, whichever is shorter; provided that my services are directly necessary or most expeditious to recover it; that I am not placed in undue danger by assisting; and that your requests do not contradict my oaths to my Lord. You can call me Rowan, by the way. Do you have any food? I could kill for some fish and chips right now, terms and conditions apply."

  "Can't help with that.  But we do have some sausages meant for the audience at competitions.  I think you'd like them; the recipe came from a very old friend of mine."  Shovash nodded backward at Damien.  "The Apocalypse loves them.  My best cook is experimenting with more vigorous sources of the meat, and I'm rather fond of the results."

  Her smile was pleasant enough to look out of place, both for the situation and for her face.  It seemed to take her effort to not leer.  "So tell us what we are disposing.  Which are the services you are most often assigned to provide?  What do you believe your best uses to be?"

"I am most often assigned to deliver messages and provide an escort for important persons," Rowan murmurs. "However, I am also intelligent and well-educated within my areas of specialty. I can provide modest travel accommodations to the First World and to other planes. I have significantly greater perceptual abilities than most people in terms purely of my ability to see other spectra than the normal range of vision, and detect energies in play. I can provide basic healing services and assorted other quality of life support. And I am told that I am charming when it suits me."

The fey agent says all of this without the slightest shift in tone. She isn't bragging; she is making statements of fact.