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The first wave has entered Pride's Folly. Cailin has played with the dragon and been knocked into the Sea of Chance a few times, but without any witnesses. Mandor and his entourage are unloading the second wave of people from the whale.
Mandor is looking wistfully at all of the irreplaceable things that he is going to expend in this endeavor. Jean and Osric brief the troops. They are displeased at having to guard Mandor's "circus" en route to the lab. Janus requests and receives another two sections of troops after Osric describes the area that they will need to defend.
Ilk and Jean experiment with sending Logrus etch-a-sketches through. The one sent to the area on the surface of the mountain doesn't make it out of the fish, who has heartburn. Another is spit up by the fish into the corridor, where it explodes. Neville notices a Pattern-Logrus explosion. Ilk hands Jean a Logrus grenade for later use.
They start fighting their way into the corridor. Neville doesn't notice any Pattern around. Either the person setting this up was very, very good, or the explosion used up all of the Logrus in the area.
They reach the first intersection, and the fish spits up the grenade. There is a massive explosion, the fish is lacking lips, and one of the Jeans is missing.
Neville inhales the excess Pattern and keeps the ceiling from falling down. The Pattern is the one with which he is familiar, and the signature is of Julian and Dara. Neville still can't detect the Pattern -- he could only detect it in its interactions with the Logrus and its attempts to increase the entropy of everything around it.
People continue down towards the lab. The dragon has lots of fun burning things. Neville has cause to use his Pattern blade on a number of occasions; it's behaving like a normal blade, but sharper. Marial's people have better weapons than the enemy; Neville has a better weapon than Marial's troops.
Cailin continues to fail to notice any magic here. There isn't any, even in those balls orbiting Mandor's head. He takes the dragon with him and goes off perpendicular to the line of march to experiment. He casts a light spell on a stone about 10 or 20 meters away. He thinks that he succeeded, but the light isn't glowing. A soldier taps him on the shoulder and asks him to turn that thing off. He asks the dragon, who starts laughing. Cailin tries to conjure a mirror, and fails.
A guard reports. "We've lost three troops, and have gained the entrance of the lab." The dragon has a blade stuck between two of its scales. It's been trying to scrape it out, to no avail. Nobody can pull it out, either. Neville reaches out to try to manipulate reality to pull the sword out, and falls over as the reality engine slaps him.
People are chased around a corner by Mandor so he can do his ritual. Cailin yetis and tries to dislodge the sword from the dragon. After a while, there is a rush of air, a heartfelt curse, a shake, and then nothing.
They decide to wait another hour. About forty-five minutes later, Mandor comes around the corner, looking a bit less than his usual dapper self. It looks like someone dragged him through a dusty Jeffreys tube. "The barrier is down."
They head into the lab.
There is opposition in the lab; they are not highly skilled and seem to be mostly making it up as they go along. At Janus's command, Gil and Calla go in and start shredding them, arguing with each other as they do so. The opponents are pulpy, knobby, many-armed creatures who are just throwing things at random. Some are harmless; others are deadly.
Mandor works on the mind-wipe field, making the lines of magical power visible so that people can avoid disturbing them. After some time, there is a grand krakathum, and the enemies in the area stop moving. Jean fails to get all of them at once, so tries one at a time. He can get one every 8-10 seconds, at his fastest.
Jean-troops start forming circles around Mandor's next project.
Cailin studies the magic in the lab. It's incredibly intertwined and complex, and it has Gwen's signature all over it. Wow, she was an impressively skilled mage.
Mandor finishes the ritual by cutting his own thumb and dripping a bit -- he's completely out of supplies.
Johnnie starts working on hacking into the machine. He spends at least four hours just studying the equipment before he touches it. There are now several days of Jean.
Jean and Calla head off to take the fight to the clones. Eventually, Jean stops wasting bodies and starts just mind-wiping all of them. They're acquiring people as soon as they come out of the one-way passage from the cloning vat.
People wail. Gil, Janus, Mandor, and Jean are playing cards.
Jean updates Marial. Marial asks for her troops back. They get to keep Gil, Janus, and Calla, though. When the troops return, they report that the fight was actually fairly easy. Marial tells Jean that she expects Julian's troops to be invading Chaos any time now.
Jean reports the impending attack to the people that he is bodyguarding, at the Old Lords meeting.
Serpent's Apprentice has located the Suhuy who trained him after a small search, assisted in part by Shiryu/Andron. Ilk fills in Suhuy on recent happenings.
Bibliomancy - ask Melk?
They chat. At great length. Suhuy has been masquerading as Ilk here -- the people here had already been conditioned to respect that signature. Suhuy gives Ilk a great deal of information regarding reality seeds, grey spheres, and the marbles.
Suhuy returns to Ilk's Chaos to fix the Logrus; Ilk hangs out to babysit the local Logrus. Ilk sends a Logrus message-packet back to his reality with Suhuy.
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