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[The logs are not a silly place]
The mob is approaching the edge of the gardens in Amber.
Local Titania says that her other self should get choice of weapons, since she is the challenger. The Titanias morph their surroundings. Neville isn't entirely sure what is going on.
The bug-yeti sees a familiar-looking dragon appear.
Ilk still can't see inside the garden. He asks what is going on, and Natasha starts describing what she sees. Everyone quickly realizes that they each see something different.
Zack, who has finally emerged from the dome, does not look very good.
At this moment, the library in Vanir's Wrath shakes to its foundations and begins to fall apart, with the exception of the librarian's circle. Jean goes downstairs.
Jean goes to find Verra. Just as he arrives, the entire Vatican is starting to shake. Jean fails to see Titania on the horizon. There are columns of colored smoke shooting up out of the ground. The Dzur are circling around several of the pillars. One of them dives in and falls upwards. He is not happy about this -- he apparently wanted to go down.
Verra is stalking out with fire in her eyes and anger in her face. She's heading towards one of the pillars. Jean converges with her; she asks him to wait. She's pissed -- "Nobody, but nobody, shakes my temple."
[Jean believes that he has spotted the typo -- the name of this reality is actually, "Verra's Wrath"]
Verra stamps one foot, and a crack appears in the ground. The cobblestones beneath her feet appear to have formed a stairwell heading down. She heads down the stairs, followed by a line of nuns singing prayers to Verra in Latin. The Dzur see the nuns going in, and line up to either side of them.
Once Jean gets down the stairs, he sees an army of white winged statues. The tanks start rolling down the stairs behind the nuns, and the saucer bails back upstairs and goes to look for Norton. He quarters the world, but still fails to find Norton.
Jean whales in the rest of the Dzur from Amber, and tells Snarsht and company about the statues in Vanir's Wrath.
Cailin un-Yetis, and the bug-Yeti escapes, sprints directly into the garden, bounces off the dragon, and ends up face-down in the ground with a dragon paw on its back.
Neville's connection to the reality engine shows a blinking light. "Contingency Three Activated". He tells the Ilk in castle Amber. Neville pulls in his Morganti that ate Gwen and questions it. It says that she left some time ago. Neville asks the sword where she is, and the sword starts tugging Neville in a direction.
Jean can see that Ingold just fell on his face, on his Pattern. Jean asks Darkstar for a trump of Ingold, Gil, or Janus. Jean says that Ingold just fell over on his Pattern. Darkstar curses, pulls out a trump, and pulls Ingold through. Ilk can tell that he's not charged with Pattern-energy, but is wearing both of those amulets.
Jean asks Cailin where biblio-Cailin is.
Neville asks Jean for a lift to Vanir's Wrath.
Ilk thinks that he could get an emergency burst transmission out on the Ilk-band by sticking it to Neville's Pattern Armor. The message:
All of the Ilks in this reality, including the one baby-sitting, receive the message.
Neville places hamster Gerard in charge of the castle's defense before leaving.
The Savior of Chaos receives the message and announces it to the group in Arden. Jean's armor develops a flaw and a butterfly flies through it. The flaw grows, and the cat leaps into it. The flaw repairs behind the Old Lords.
Cailin feels vaguely uneasy and he smacks against the armored Boba-Jean, and after a few minutes of someone trying to grind him into the armor, he pops out and appears in the whale.
There is no longer a dragon's paw on the bug. The bug is now running into a whale's mouth.
The baby-sitting Ilk tries to get the attention of the Serpent and Princess Chandra and relays the message.
There is a momentary disruption in the air, and Ilk can see Princess Chandra standing over something. She pauses, looks up, says, "Summoned I obey", turns, and steps into the chamber.
The Serpent says, "Now would be good" and there is a push, and the three of them (Princess Chandra, Serpent's Apprentice, and Cailin's kid) are standing outside something that looks vaguely like a Vatican building except for the pillars of smoke.
The whale arrives outside the Vatican, and the bug-Yeti punches a hole through the whale's tail. The butterfly flies out of the butterfly's blow hole. The Dzurlords march out and line up to march down the cobblestone stairwell.
There is a very large, very green, and very draconian-looking individual, being ridden by a small boy and Princess Chandra. It appears to be an oriental style dragon, right down to the pointed beard, but with the addition of wings.
The small boy looks very familiar to Cailin.
The dentist is threatening the cat with his dental tools. The whale is yowling in pain. Jean fishes out the whale to Sea World for repairs.
Yeti-Cailin asks Snarsht for translation; Snarsht points in the direction of the fleeing yeti-bug. Cailin sprints off and catches the bug.
"The battle is over that way"
"No! No! Put me down you fool!"
When Cailin brings the bug back over to Snarsht, the bug is in yet another form. The bug is now shaped like a small lumpy whitish humanoid.
Cailin complains some more. Snarsht leaps up on his shoulder and licks at Cailin's vocal cords. The yeti regains speech.
The battle downstairs is bloody.
Neville tries to play with the reality engine. He can't divert or shut down the statues' power; they're not drawing through him or from the reality engine. He can blast them with energy from the reality engine, however. The Morgantis don't work -- there is nothing there to drink.
Princess Chandra leaps off the dragon down the hole.
Verra is sitting on the sidelines blasting the enemy with god-lightning.
Neville's sword is still pointing through the mass of statues.
Someone where in reality, Jean turns the tank manufacturing farm on high and starts convoying tanks out through the rift in the power plant into Vanir's Wrath.
The dragon heads down a different hole, and the stones just crumble to dust before it.
Cailin knows that magic doesn't work here, yet he can feel magic pouring off the individual on the back of the dragon. Cailin heads towards the dragon.
Cailin asks Snarsht to release the marbles from him. Snarsht goes off, circles a plant a few times, it grows, dies, grows again, dies, and grows again, then deposits a bean pod. Cailin walks over and picks up the pod, but isn't entirely sure what to do with it. Snarsht gives up and knocks Cailin's arm, sending the pod into his mouth. Cailin swallows. A few minutes later, the bean pod squirms its way back up his throat. It's a lot larger, and contains two dozen marbles and six grey spheres. It falls to the ground and cracks. Cailin gathers up the stuff and heads towards the hole.
Jean asks Snarsht if this is one of the rare circumstances where an insane Norton might help. Snarsht points out using Jean's own memories that ... (?)
It's kind of a scary thing to see a small butterfly taking out statues. Whenever Rainbow passes near a statue, it falls apart.
Cailin thanks Lord Snarsht, then heads after the dragon. The last sight he sees before he goes underground is a thin, gangly guy with a sword on his back riding a horse towards the Vatican. He looks like Benedict, with the exception that every square inch of his body is charred.
Neville releases his daggers, with some basic instructions on what to kill and what to avoid. Every now and then, Jean has to sidestep a dagger.
The dragon notices that there are a dozen small things down there that are anathema to him. They're fighting on his side, so he notes it for later reference.
Cailin reaches his son, and realizes that he is indeed singing forth raw, pure, magic from within his heart. Cailin grabs power and prepares to animate the spheres and marbles. Currently, the kid is singing about the joy of flying on the back of a dragon.
When the dragon causes statues to entropy into powder, it feels as if itches he hadn't noticed before are being scratched. The dragon spreads his wings and expands his shadow; as his shadow touches the statues they crumple into powder.
The ground shudders slightly, and then the roof goes away. People who have a moment to look upwards see a very satisfied-looking Benedict who has just pushed down a plunger and neatly taken out the roof without dropping any stone on his allies.
Neville realizes that there is an actual pattern to Verra's actions. Each statue that she is blasting is covering a crack growing in the floor.
The dragon flies higher and spreads his shadow farther.
Cailin, Neville, and the others are advancing on the core of the enemy.
Cailin starts circling the marbles around his head. Those people familiar with Mandor's work find it familiar. The marbles aren't reproducing. Cailin switches to grey spheres.
Benedict has jumped from the edge of the pit onto a place that wasn't clear until after he landed, next to a crack that just opened, and pulls himself down through the crack. The butterfly, who watched this, follows. Neville, seeing this, opens a hole and a set of stairs down using the reality engine.
One of the hipogrifs knocks Cailin on the back of the head, stunning him momentarily. The ex-bug falls to the ground. Cailin blasts the hypogriph with a flechette-gun spell using the grey spheres. There is a lot of white dust around.
Osric has established some manner of communication with the cloud. It's not malevolent; it's just hungry. It doesn't understand moving or not eating.
[The center of the Gwen taint on the Fringe was a Fringe Gate to Vanir's Wrath!]
"Who are you? Where do you come from?"
"I am. I have always been."
"If eating makes you bigger, what makes you smaller?"
"What is smaller?"
Osric continues working on basic concepts.
Johnnie wanders by and tells Osric that they have a power drain.
Johnnie goes through to take a look, steps back almost instantly. "You've got to see this."
Osric pulls up a portable console. The power level is down to two or three percent. The power is going towards the garden in Amber.
He's not sure how he knows that the power is going towards the garden in Amber.
Osric has Johnnie look - the power drain isn't coming from on the Fringe. Osric comes in to look, and the power drain is coming from the Fringe. Osric plays the hokey-pokey, and determines that the draw is coming from him.
Johnnie goes off to tell people to throw more worshipers off the Fringe, and Osric tries to reduce the number of power drains. Johnnie contacts Osric and warns him that he might die - they're going to try to throw a Kraken off the Fringe. There is a loud boom, and the Fringe power goes from 2 percent to 11 percent. Osric hears cursing. The roots were apparently intertwined with all of the plants in all of their oceans, and all of their ocean plant life just went away. Osric hears more cursing. All of the sea-creatures that used to live near the plants are killing themselves. They're throwing them off the Fringe.
Osric has stopped the power drain by stepping onto the Fringe.
On the next level down in Vanir's Wrath, Cailin can see a Fringe Gate. He draws power from it.
People realize that each level involves another transfer through a celestial sphere.
Osric can see that one specific gate is being a power draw. The gate is not active, but there is being power drawn through it.
Johnnie realizes that the whales that committed suicide were the planet's sentient race, so they don't need to replace the ocean plant life. He tells Osric.
Osric starts building some nasty weapons in preparation for going through to confront Gwen, including some that deal with blucite.
Ilk notices that his shadow doesn't have wings, and it does just fine even on the next level, removed farther from the light.
Osric turns on that Fringe Gate, and notices that the power drain has stopped. He goes through in his combat form, and finds himself in the midst of a bunch of white statues. They don't appear to be contagious.
Osric bashes at the statues physically, and they crumple.
Once again, the ceiling crumples above them and lets light in. However, the people on the level above still see a floor. Benedict looks puzzled, because his explosives didn't act the way that he expected them to.
An assassin pulls itself out of mid-air next to Jean and asks Jean to asks his goddess Verra to open another stairway. They apparently need another one.
Verra looks, raises her hands, twists, and the floor falls through. All of the cracks that she was sealing open, the enemy falls through, and then the floor snaps closed again. The white statues fell into a different part of the sphere.
They go through the stairs to level two. Verra looks, and concentrates, and opens a stairwell to level three.
The bottom of the stairs is in mid-air, and there is a huge celestial city with thousands and thousands of angels flying about. In the center is a vibrating pillar of light.
Neville's sword points directly at the center of mass of the pillar, which is level with the base of the stairs. Verra stands at the base of the stairs and calls out in a load voice, "Who dares disturb those who worship me?" A wave of silence spreads out as the hosannas die out.
There is a butterfly that flutters down and starts fluttering towards the pillar. There is a dragon that is sailing towards the pillar. As the dragon swept past one of the stairs, there was a slight weight on his claws as Princess Chandra leaps up and climbs onto him. Cailin magically flies towards the pillar. Neville jets off towards the pillar using his Pattern-armor. The Jean tanks tractor each other and try to form a bridge to the city.
The bug regains a bit of courage, gets pissed off, and discovers that it is in the form of a yeti, not a bug-sized yeti, but a full-sized yeti. The bug now has Cailin's dream memories, is pissed off at the glowing pillar, and is afraid of Princess Chandra and large cats.
Jean pulls a tank out of the line and talks with the cat on the surface. Jean notices a ring of dead bodies with angel badges around the cat. Snarsht licks his paw and pats Jean. The tank rejoins the line.
Neville's daggers are finally happy. They have something living to eat, the angels. The dragon notices that those nasty things are stealing souls from him, and notes it for later reference.
It's hard to tell who is moving faster, Neville or the dragon. Neville is mostly being pulled by the vengeful Morganti.
Verra is stomping her way towards the city. There are cobblestones forming beneath her feet as she walks. The Dzur and Dragonlords are protecting the nuns, who are powering Verra.
Osric heads down the stairs, and can see Gwen forming. She's drawing upon Fringe power in order to do so. It's not a lot, and it's only one of the powers that she is using. Osric contemplates his options. Osric prepares to get her attention by overloading her with Fringe power when the timing is right.
The blinking green light in Neville's head now reads, "Contingency three complete".
"She's baaack."
Verra has realized that Neville and the dragon are going to get there before her, and sacrifices some of her godlike dignity and teleports herself over there. She has several minutes before the others arrive.
Jean plans on filling the celestial city with tanks.
Verra reaches into the column of light and slaps Gwen across the face. This gets Gwen's attention, and she attacks Verra back.
Neville's sword stops pulling him forwards. He gets the sensation of impending doom. Princess Chandra is staring at him, or, more accurately, his sword. Neville's sword has suddenly gone from, "Must kill!" to "Nothing to see here."
"My lady? Is there a problem?" Neville asks Princess Chandra.
"Not any more," and the speed of the dragon carries it past Neville.
"What's the matter?" Neville asks the sword.
"She doesn't like me! She never liked me!" the sword replies.
Neville continues to argue with his sword, and continues towards the city on thrusters.
Jean can tell that there are words pouring out of Gwen's mouth. He can't see them - it's just a blue stream of dots.
Cailin can see that she's using bibliomancy, and launches his flechette gun spell, firing the grey spheres, with Gwen's true name on the spell.
The Jean-tanks are filling the city.
The large-bug-Yeti is running along the path formed by Verra.
Osric force-feeds Gwen as much Fringe energy as he can. The pillar of light suddenly wavers, and she falls out of the edge of it, with a very surprised look on her face. Just to soften her up, all of the tanks, about three million of them, dial their main guns up to eleven and fire one volley at Gwen. There is a hole torn in reality where she was standing.
She's not in this celestial sphere at the moment.
Verra and the dragon are heading towards the hole.
Most of the people make it through the hole. No Jean makes it, and the bug doesn't make it.
There is all of a sudden a slight weight on the yeti-bug's back. Cailin is slightly startled. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw someone or something leap off the base of the stair and land on the bug's back. It's Benedict. Just before the bug reaches the pillar, something yanks it off course and sends it through a hole.
On the other side of the hole there is a very dark land. Three moons hang in the sky, looking as if they haven't moved in a while. The trees are very stark and very twisted. There is a large mausoleum nearby inscribed with lettering that reads, "Here lies King Laetatio". It seems to be centered beneath the moons. Lying, bleeding, on top of the mausoleum is Gwen. The reason why she is bleeding is because Princess Chandra is standing over her bleeding body and stabbing her every now and then. She can be heard listing people's names as she stabs. Gwen is not drawing on any power. The marbles are circling Verra's head. Verra is standing on the mausoleum. The dragon is flying a patrol pattern around the area.
"This is for my son, King Laetatio, this is for my grandson Cailin," The list includes all of the hundreds that were killed during the destruction of Darkover.
Neville's sword cautions him not to look too closely at what is going on. For a moment, he looks through the blade's mode of awareness and can see that with every stroke, Princess Chandra is slicing off a piece of Gwen's life-force. As the pieces are being sliced off, they are being sucked into something, not like being Morganti'd, but more permanent. The sword says that, being a Great Weapon, it can hold souls instead of just returning them to the wheel. It held this one because it was powerful, but it got away.
Cailin dispels the spell on the marbles, and they stop circling Verra and return to him.
One of the things that Cailin notices is that the kid is still singing magery into this area, but instead of being broadcast, the magic is all spiraling down into the mausoleum itself.
Neville notices that Verra is bleeding. It's hard to tell where the blood is coming from. He puts his sword away and approaches her.
Osric is smoking a cigar, and has gone back to check out the Fringe gate on the next level up. Johnnie says that they've drained the oceans, and the sludge beneath them, and the magma, and are currently working on core material. The Fringe is up to 25-30% power.
Jean shuts down the tank factory, reaches the rift with a pyramid of tanks, and goes through.
Gwen is no more. There is not even a lifeless husk left so much as carved meat. Princess Chandra picks up the carved meat, nudges open the door to the mausoleum with a foot, enters the mausoleum, and lays Gwen's remains down at the feet of King Laetatio as if in an offering.
Verra carefully climbs down from the mausoleum. Neville offers her some healing; she claims to be undamaged.
After Princess Chandra's last stab, the blinking light in Neville's head switched from "Contingency plan three complete" to "Contingency plan three failed". When Princess Chandra laid the Gwen giblets at the foot of King Laetatio's bier, the blinking stopped entirely.
Princess Chandra turns to Cailin and tells him that he may tell his animate-dead-self that they have left an offering. Princess Chandra tells Cailin that she will be busy for the next little bit, and that he should take his kid and leave. She points to the kid on the back of the dragon. Ilk feels that Princess Chandra wants him, now.
The dragon lands, and the kid climbs off his back.
The kid looks back at the dragon. "So that's what you look like! All I could see before were the two green pointy things." The dragon shrugs. The kid speaks again. The dragon nods.
The kid looks around some more. "Wow, there are people in the universe. Who are you?"
Princess Chandra pats him on the head. "Kieron, I want you to meet somebody. Kieron, this is Cailin. Cailin, this is Kieron. Cailin is the person who thinks that he is your father... Natasha is your mother."
Princess Chandra continues with introductions. The more that the bug thinks about being called a leaf bug, the more it looks like a leaf bug again.
Neville approaches Benedict and tells him of the problems in Amber. Benedict decides that dealing with Amber is more important than healing.
Neville releases his sword to go join the other Morgantis in eating Angels.
Princess Chandra hands the scale to Ilk. "We should go back. Do you know where it is?" "No." Princess Chandra sighs, gathers the last of her power together, and pushes them both back to the round room. She collapses.
Verra disappears, and the Dzur and Dragonlords go with her. The nuns look confused; any angels that catch sight of the nuns look even more confused. The Jean tanks stun angels so the Morgantis can eat them.
Osric is back on the Fringe.
The butterfly lands next to the leaf bug and kisses it. The leaf bug is confused.
Jean whales everyone but Snarsht back to Amber.
The local Titania seems to be winning the fight. In fact, at one point she managed to free Bun-bun for long enough for him to get a cut on the foreign Titania before Bun-bun was re-frozen.
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