Having completed his other business, Tolben rends space once again, rendering himself to Sothis to examine the body left behind by Stars Falling. The body itself is still maintaining its odd effect on local gravity and atmosphere, and has a large uninhabited zone around it now, the locals having learned by experience where the edges of safety lie.

Tolben manages to cut off a sample of the body, and finds the properties extend to severed pieces, in proportion to the sample's size. Some further examination finds that it's in effect shunting air inward, pulling it into the "flesh." It appears as though the air is removed at this point, sent elsewhere by some means or completely unmade. The whole effect is mediated by gravitational pull that keeps the air, like everything else, moving inwards towards the body.

After a bit of trial and error and some minor setbacks that destroy what's left of a house, he works out a way to modify this gravitational aura, based around the life bubble spell. It's a simple fix to implement, and results in air being kept around the sample in a gravity field, but not being pulled in enough to actually disappear. The implementation is relatively straightforward and quick; it doesn't require that much skill, either, though obviously figuring it out in the first place would have been a good deal harder.

As Tolben delves into research once more, he returns to something of an equilibrium. Nonetheless, urgency drives him onward.

"It can be done, then. I can make this thing, and once I have forged the path, others may follow. Others must follow, if Golarion is to be made safe."

With little understanding of what a "marketing campaign" looks like, Tolben decides that a demonstration is in order. He fabricates a small boat from battered timbers, affixing a piece of Primordial to its bottom. Standing atop it, he allows the gravitational magic to hold the boat to his feet as he flies into the inhabited part of the city.

Aside from Stars Falling, the rest of the magic is temporary. Nonetheless, this demonstration shows that Voidcraft can be made from the corpse for far less than the king's ransom which would normally be required.

The people look at Tolben with a mixture of awe and confusion in Sothis. People are struck by the ease of its flight and the way that he seems to cling to this torn-off piece of a nigh-godly power, a power that left them breathless merely for coming too close to it. How does it work, they mutter, and after he has landed a handful of enchanters and scholars come to ask him that exact question. He shows them the basic nature of the process he used, and they leave with excited ideas about days to come.

Tolben gathers several more samples, distributing them for experimentation. Then he makes for the palace of the Ruby Prince. In all his finery, it is not long before he finds a functionary to address.

"I require an audience with the Prince and the Council tomorrow. We will discuss the use of Stars Falling to rejuvenate the city and protect the planet."

The functionary looks at Tolben, winces, and gapes for a moment before stammering out an agreement. She immediately looks as though she regrets having agreed, but isn't willing to actually argue with Tolben, not when half the city witnessed him fly through the air on a carved-off piece of the Primordial's manifestation.

Without another word, Tolben cuts open reality and retires to his demiplane for the day. After taking an hour to regain his equilibrium, he turns his mind to information gathering.

Invoking the power of his bonded ring, he casts Greater Scrying to view the Abyssal Rift and check that particular ember has not yet reignited.

Then he turns his mind to another problem. He has not had time to develop a specialized divination for spacetime warping, as the denizens of the gas giants have, and so once again he allows the infinite to pass through him. Though he cannot contain it, once again he clings to the answer to a single question.

Where shall the next Primordial attack?

Though the process is draining, he repeats it. Why stop at a single pass?

Will Golarion be destroyed this week?

Even as the waves recede from his second moment of omniscience, he prepares to undergo a third - only to stop himself. Though he has a third question, it is better left unanswered.

Following a troubled night's rest, he makes an early start in returning to Sothis. His first stop is with the crafters and researchers, to see what progress they have made in their first night with the new materials. After an hour, he proceeds to the palace.

The Abyssal rift in Tian Xia does not appear to have reopened just yet. The first question yields only jumbled chaotic not-patterns in his head, not enough information available to draw conclusions confidently. The second, however, yields a complicated array of patterns and formulae ultimately resolving into a single result: Golarion may be fundamentally and irrevocably altered, but is very unlikely to be genuinely destroyed this week.

After returning to Sothis, the artificers are making good progress, starting to develop suits designed to survive and mitigate the effects of Stars Falling's atmospheric influence. Tolben finds the palace under heavy guard, but he is escorted in by a cautious person in heavy plate armor who moves like she knows how to handle herself in a fight. Once inside, he is escorted to the throne room, and finds Ruby Prince Khemet III sitting on his bronze throne.

It's an old throne, and sturdy enough that it seems it could bear up under the weight of the roof above it. The prince is less sturdy, but his pale brown eyes are surprisingly intense in his youthful face - though he's well into middle age, he still appears to be in his early twenties physically. He nods to Tolben as the wizard walks in.

"My servant told me you wished an audience, Wizard. Be welcome in my hall."
This message was last edited by the GM at 23:56, Sun 20 Sept 2020.

Tolben looks at the Prince with eyes which have calculated his value in a dozen ways - and that value stubbornly remains at zero.

"Thank you. As I am sure you know, your artisans are experimenting with some magics I provided to make use of the remnants of Stars Falling. This new industry, if carefully managed, could be the salve your wounded city needs."

The wizard politely, if impatiently, waits for Prince Khemet to absorb his words and formulate a response.

Prince Khemet considers the wizard's words carefully, nodding slowly at the end. "I take your meaning, Wizard. You are sure that it is safe, for my city, that people so use the body of this being?" At the assurance that it is, he nods again.

"I will take your word for it, then. You are well known to be educated in such matters. Access will have to be regulated, and the proceeds taxed, but I think I am in agreement with you as to the correct course of action. It would be foolish to simply ignore such a possibility." The prince smiles. It's an expression that would look quite at home on a lion about to pounce on some unsuspecting impala.

Tolben inclines his head, managing not to look or sound condescending.

"That is sensible of you. I do have a request, however - one which will require international cooperation. Recent events show that we need an early warning system to ensure that threats to the world can be discovered before they arrive. I am particularly concerned by the risk of errant asteroids.

Craft built from the corpse are well suited to exploration, and so their captains are the most likely to get wind of these threats. An organization to coordinate threat detection and response, accept reports and offer rewards will be needed."

Khemet nods slowly. "Yes, that makes sense. I doubt we can coordinate everyone, but I can talk to Queen Thrune of Cheliax, maybe contact Qadira, Absalom...yes, this seems like something that should be fairly easy to convince people to coordinate on."

"Excellent. I will leave the matter in your capable hands. Now, if you'll excuse me, my divinations have so far failed to discern the location of the next attack. I must return to that task."

With a nod, Tolben turns to leave, choosing not to teleport directly from the throne room. At a second thought, he turns back.

"Oh, and if you should receive a visit from the gas giants, do pass on my regards."

"Gas giants? Ah, I will do so, if I see someone from such a place," Khemet says, seeming a little taken aback. "Go with the grace of...well. Go with grace." He nods his head at Tolben's receding back.

Tolben's demiplane is a great tower. Beyond its windows nothing can be seen, but the interior is lit by a warm, soft light remniscent of candles - though much brighter.

The bookshelves lining the round walls produce an endless quantity of nuts and berries, the overripe ones falling to the ground and decaying to nothingness in a heartbeat.

On this particular occasion, the wizard is in his ritual chamber. Chalk symbols cover the floor, pulsating rarely as they pick up the slightest hint of a wave in space and time itself. The demiplane serves as an acceptable experimental base, since the only local Primordial manifestations are controllable - the pieces Tolben bears, within and without.

He places a dozen grains from Small Made Large in a pattern to the right of the main circle. Ripples propagate as their influence is felt. Then he carefully removes a single grain, leaving precisely eleven in the pattern.

Tolben counts the grains of Small Made Large to twelve in the pattern. He removes one and counts again and...there are only ten. Add the single grain back, count again, and there are twelve. Rearrange the pattern, repeat the process, and the same result is seen, as though it is not possible for eleven grains to be present, somehow. Every other number from one to twelve is possible. But eleven grains refuse to be present.

"What? Impossible! The numerology of the Primordials gives a result in my own domain? I must have contaminated the experiment. Well... probably."

Tolben goes off on a low-key rant featuring terms such as "corrupting the vectors" and "nexus of non-energy", as he redraws the diagrams within his chamber. This time, he uses tiny slices of Stars Falling, cut from a carefully-contained sample. Once again he tries the number eleven, and records the result.

"To think I was just planning to complete the divination the Void-walker suggested, with a little side test into relevant numbers. Truly, the greatest discoveries come about by happy accident. Ah, but I must repeat these tests on other planes; I've performed enough experiments here to bleed into the demiplane's nature by now."

The wizard quickly goes through the levels of his tower, pulling a dozen tomes from seemingly random shelves as he prepares for a little field trip.

The same pattern happens with slices of Stars falling. Ten, twelve, and no number in between. It doesn't seem to matter what plane the experiments are done on. It is, quite simply, not possible to have eleven component pieces of a Primordial, by any means that Tolben is able to find. Even in an antimagic field, the eleventh component in the pattern is always able to not be present.

After a thoroughly exhaustive round of experiments proves beyond doubt that the phenomenon is entirely Primordial in nature, Tolben returns to his tower-plane for some theoretical analysis.

"Eleven, eleven... represent fundamental properties of existence... shuttering planes... I see."

A heavy tome leaps to his grasp, and he turns without hesitation to page 363. The text is just as he had remembered.

... may shift without notice. The essential nature of the Elemental Planes is more fixed, but some scholars[9][10] have suggested that they would be just as changeable if their contents were altered. There is no practical way to test such hypotheses, but they do speak to the...

The next book, rather bizarrely, is one of idioms, and on page 15 it describes help arriving at the moment of crisis as "at the eleventh hour". A survey of wind patterns following magical intervention gives some insight on page 289. Crystalline structures, wave patterns, silk production, and other disjoint topics are slowly woven together into a coherent hypothesis - at least in as much as Tolben's thoughts could be considered coherent.

The number eleven is an essential element of the Primordials. The Primordials represent core components of the universe. Even so, the universe does not obviously run on elevens. Thus the number is an attack vector.

To destroy a Primordial would have unlimited negative effects. But if the Primordials were to be twelve, not eleven...

Finally, Tolben subsides into inactivity. He would almost seem asleep, if it weren't for the lack of snoring. After hours of thoughts so intricate they may never be thought again, he comes to knowledge with absolute certainty.

"There is no eleventh Primordial."

The pivot on which the others hinge, missing. No fulcrum for the lever. With such disarray, the trouble they make is inevitable. But that leaves a new question.

"Why are we still here?"

If a concept is so core to existence that even the Primordial concepts revolve around it, its removal must surely leave the universe unviable. Perhaps the concept yet persists, even as its Primordial manifestation does not. Or perhaps the discord of the latest decades is rooted in that absence.

"This is as far as I can go with this mystery. Tomorrow I will report my findings to the others, but for today..."

Tolben sighs, and stands to get back to the much less interesting problem of divining the next attack location.

Tolben manages, with difficulty, to replicate the divination spell that the gas gianter communicated to him telepathically. With two casts, he is able to triangulate the strongest locus of space-time warping to be in Kyonin. Consulting maps, the only settlement of note in the right place to be the target is the mercantile port city of Greengold.

Once again, Tolben treats the strictures of space and time with contempt. He does, however, respect the bare minimum tenets of diplomacy by choosing to transit to Greengold rather than the Queen's palace in Iadara.

Tired from a long day of research, the wizard does not immediately speak when he arrives at the Mayor's estate.

The Mayor's doorman, surprisingly, requires more persuasion than the Prince's had to be convinced that Tolben is allowed entry. But eventually, he yields, and shows the wizard inside.

The mayor, a tall, thin elf with narrow features (even by the standards of his people) and golden eyes looks at Tolben with slight disdain on his features. "Yes, what is it?" he says, in the tone of someone who is already planning his next meeting.