![[previous]](gu-prev.gif){kind=small}
![[next]](gu-next.gif){kind=small}
Back to the index.
Auricle is currently a silicon spider, following Aramek into Arden. Aramek is shifting shape, and Auricle shifts to match. They both end up shaped as six-year old boys. Aramek is clutching a big stick; Auricle has a black box strapped to her right leg.
Zack and Ingold were following the spiders, with Zack trying Stormy's trump periodically. They catch up to the spiders not long after they become children. Auricle is poking at Aramek with sharp tendrils, checking for life signs. Zack approaches, and asks Auricle if the spider was intelligent, and how it is doing. Auricle replies that it seems to be smarter than the average spider, and it doesn't look like it's going to die.
Zack conjures some smelling salts and tries to wake Aramek up, with no effect. Aramek just seems to be out cold. His nerve endings are firing like mad, which could indicate lots of pain, self repair, or maybe even pleasure. They decide to move him somewhere else, and Auricle shifts into a large male human wearing tights and a green paisley vest and picks up the six-year old. Ingold returns to the castle, and Zack and Auricle head to a nearby ranger command post, Auricle shifting Aramek into her body to more easily carry him.
Zack tells the rangers that Auricle is an honored guest, and that the other one is a possible guest, but that remains to be seen. He also tells them that they're both shapeshifters, so if things get weird, don't panic. A ranger runner arrives with a stack of papers, and says that Zack has to catch up on his paperwork from being raised to vice-Malachai. Zack and Auricle chat while Zack does medical stuff.
Three days have passed. Beau, Cyndia, and Damia's group has rested, conducted some magical exploration, and conjured a mansion in their spare time. They consider going back into the shadow where they were hunting Lovi, but Blaze squelches that idea when she returns from a scouting mission and says that the shadow now consists soley of the wolf fighting the bear, in the few places where the snake is not.
On day four, there is a knock on the door of their mansion. Damia answers the door, it's Alia-shaped. She has a containment box for the hearts the group extracted from their recent victims. After an exchange of pleasantries, she takes the hearts, and leaves a small box behind, telling them to open it in case of emergency.
Cathryn, Ilkandacian, and Stormy are in an alternate Amber's Fiona's lab, with the Benedict from that Amber. Cathryn asks how they can get home, while Stormy studies the blue crystal. Stormy responds, "If I leave to take you home, he might hurt me", gesturing to Benedict, who chips in, "He's not going anywhere".
Cathryn checks her trumps, and they feel cold. She trumps Random, and connects after a long distance and a twist around a corner. Random looks like he is around Cathryn's age. Cathryn asks him, "Do you know who I am?", and, seeing Benedict through the connection, he replies, "Some bimbo of Benedict's?" "I don't believe you just said that". They chat briefly, then drop the connection.
Stormy continues examining the crystal. Ilk mentions that the crystal is Fiona's mother's, but cannot answer which Clarissa made it. Benedict tries to trump Bleys and fails, then is trumped by Random. Benedict asks Cathryn why she told Random they were lovers, and Cathryn denies having told Random that.
Cathryn tries to bring up the Logrus, and for six or seven ms has a sinking feeling that she had made the wrong decision, then blacks out. Ilk feels the attention of the Pattern as if it was summoning him to walk it, and tries to dive for the exit to the lab. Stormy sees Cathryn wink out and Ilk starting to explode from within, notices the Pattern reaching for Ilk and for him, grabs Ilk, and trumps the two of them to Ilk's Chaos. Stormy feels a *snap*, and there is a silver arm heading towards his neck.
Ilkandacian observes that he is at the entryway to House Cara, with Stormy about six or seven inches away from him. Stormy says, "You're in your Chaos, bye, gotta go", and trumps back.
Cathryn is in the bottom of a boat and feels like she's been taken apart. She sits up, and sees lots of water surrounding the single-masted sailboat that she is in. She makes a great effort and reaches for her trumps, tries to trump Benedict and Random, gets nothing, and assumes that she's too tired. Rests a bit. When she wakes up again, the sun hasn't moved. She tries all of her trumps and fails to connect with anyone. The sail on her boat is hanging slack. Cathryn shifts into a water form, dives out of the boat, and skitters along the bottom, which is only a few inches below the surface. She shifts into a more appropriate form and goes. The water seems to extend indefinitely, and there are no variations other than the retreating of the sailboat as she moves away from it. She reaches for the Logrus, and finds no power there.
Immediately upon arriving in Fiona's lab, Stormy receives a trump call on one of his trumps. He puts the contact on hold and, since Benedict isn't present to tell the silver arm to stop strangling him, shapeshifts out of the arm's grasp, then takes the call. Zack finally acquires trump contact with Stormy, having noticed an odd pause between the connection and the beginning of the call. Zack notices that Stormy is running around a room dodging a silver arm, and asks,
Zack: "This a bad time?"
Stormy: "Well, not really - just trying to avoid being strangled".
Zack: "How are you doing following the chain?"
Stormy: "Turvalen is following the chain."
Zack: "Anything I can do to help?"
Stormy: "Are you familiar with grey spheres?"
Zack: "What do they look like?"
Stormy holds up one, and Zack replies that he has seen them in Clarissa's place. They waffle about how to free the trapped Fionas - Titania can't do anything to help, and Zack doesn't want to risk giving it to Dworkin or Suhuy. Zack apologetically presses Stormy about Julian, and Stormy agrees to call back in a few hours, just as soon as he has dealt with his current problem.
Stormy casts trump in search of Benedict, and finds him walking the Pattern. He tries to trump gate the arm to Benedict, and the arm dodges the gate. "I can't believe that I'm baiting an arm!" Stormy ends up gating himself and the arm to a section of the Pattern room not covered by Pattern, and the arm starts waving and trying to get Benedict's attention.
Ilkandacian goes to a Cara admin and asks if his cousin has been seen recently.
"The last time he was seen, he was heading to some battle with you. Do you have any news?"Ilk goes Home, cranks it to a time rate of one hundred thousand to one, and takes a month-long nap.
Zack and Auricle chat about Stormy's situation, as observed through the trump contact. Auricle does some medical probes on the kid, and Zack puts up some defensive spells in case the kid wakes up nasty.
Zack, in an attempt to identify Auricle, pulls out his trump deck and tries to trump dead people.
As Beau, Cyndia, Damia, and company travel down the line where they think some of their family members were sent, they observe that the shadows are getting faster and faster. They stop at the place where Carlton was sent by a teleport trap earlier. There are two parallel metal rails running nearby, crossed by wooden struts. The Ornithals have become hungry, so they head to a nearby shadow containing many free-roaming herd-beasts to hunt the birds. While the birds are feeding, they hear a high-pitched, technologically-produced whistle and see a metal construct heading slowly towards them. They head back to the place where Carlton was sent, and spot a train parked neaby, and a settlement several miles back along the tracks. They find a few bits of Carlton blood near the tracks and pick it up. Damia searches for herbs and acquires a pet talking mandrake root.
Stormy is playing with Benedict's arm, and trying to lose it. When he leaves the Pattern room, it attaches itself to his throat, and when he returns to the room, it drops off again. Benedict finishes walking the Pattern and picks up a blue sphere from a pedestal sitting in the center of the Pattern. It looks like the grey spheres, but it's blue. "Is this yours?", he asks. "Not that I know of." "Meet you upstairs?" "Yah" Stormy trumps back to Fiona's lab.
Cathryn is still sliding across the water when it gets very choppy and the boat starts flapping all about. She stays in the boat.
Stormy meets Benedict upstairs in the lab. Stormy comments on the silver arm and asks Benedict how long he has had it, and Benedict replies that his father gave him the arm to remind him of the deaths of his two full brothers, as he was partially implicated in their deaths, and that he has had it ever since then. Stormy studies the blue sphere that Benedict brought back from the center of the Pattern, spots Cathryn inside it, and trumps her out.
Stormy asks Benedict to see his trump of Fiona, then makes a trump for and tries to contact that Fiona, and fails. Cathryn gives Stormy her trump of Fiona, and he tries to contact that Fiona, fails, then tries his own trump, and drops the contact once he starts reaching cross-reality. Stormy mentions that neither one of the Fionas in those spheres is from Cathryn's reality. He makes a trump to the Fiona of the reality in which the first sphere was supposedly found, and chats with her briefly. Unfortunately, she can't help.
Cathryn asks where Ilkandacian went, and Stormy replies that he sent him to her Chaos, and Benedict pulled her off the Pattern.
Stormy tries to TK the blue crystal and fails. He asks Cathryn to lift it, and she fails. He then pumps his strength, tries to lift it, and fails, almost making a dent in the floor, but not budging the crystal. Stormy asks Benedict how his sister brought the crystal in here, and after looking at the door, walls, floor, and ceiling, replies, "Not physically." Stormy tries to trump gate the crystal into the sea by Rebma, but the crystal fails to budge.
Stormy says that he thinks that the crystal is interfering with his attempts to un-sphere the Fionas, and offers to trump Cathryn back to her Chaos. Benedict wants reassurances that he will return, saying that Oberon told him to keep an eye on Fiona, and offers to go with them.
They talk about balance between the realities, and Stormy jokingly suggests that Benedict should go through the crystal and check, since Cathryn is clearly unwilling to do so. Benedict touches the crystal and disappears. He comes back a few minutes later, just before Stormy and Cathryn decide to escape while they can, and says that in order for his daughter to go back to where she belongs, Cathryn needs to go home via Tir, according to a Flora he saw there. Benedict says that his daughter is there, and goes back through to ask Flora where Cathryn would re-appear in her reality.
Stormy gives Cathryn his trump, and says to call if she needs help. Cathryn is paranoid that the entire scheme is a plot by Flora to kill her, so Stormy hands Cathryn the grey spheres and tries to enter the blue crystal, but it's solid to his touch. Cathryn hands back the spheres and tries to walk through the crystal, but hits the rock. Benedict comes back, and says that the people on the other side don't know where in her reality Cathryn would arrive, either.
Stormy trumps the three of them, plus the two grey spheres and Benedict's silver arm, to Cathryn's Courts of Chaos, and they appear in House Cara reception. They chat briefly as the Cara receptionist scribbles notes madly, and then head out towards House Jesby. Cathryn warns Benedict that his analogue here is the head of the Warriors' Guild, so people may try to kill him. As they approach Jesby, a band of four people charge Benedict, crying, "Ahah! We knew you would approach this House!" Benedict grows a blade from his hand, and, grinning madly, kills the four of them with three blows.
Upon arriving at House Jesby, Cathryn is greeted, and a clerk hands her some dispatches. No reports of unexpected visitors, however. Cathryn takes them to where she left, and there's a crack there. Benedict can see it and Cathryn can see it, but Stormy can't see it. Cathryn draws an outline around the crack with the Logrus, and the crack sucks at her Logrus, but doesn't draw her in. Benedict grabs a passerby and throws him right through the space where the crack is, and the subject lands on the far side, unconscious. Stormy rants about not finding anyone to send back as an excuse, so he'll have to work through the situation logically. He leaves Cathryn in Jesby, and trumps himself and Benedict to a place where he can work in peace.
Ilkandacian is at Home after a month of rest, accomplished in about five minutes of Chaos-time. He notices that Home is lacking the influence of his cousin, which could result in some damage over the long-term, so he leaves the shadow and cranks its time rate down to a crawl, to minimize the damage. Since Cathryn is presumably in another reality, and he doesn't have any way to contact Stormy, he heads out to look for his cousin by looking for Clarissa, who presumably transported him out of the battle in Arden.
Ilk teleports to Dragaera, and starts Logrus-searching for Clarissa while looking physically for Morrolan. He encounters Sethra LaVode, who asks him why he is using pre-empire sorcery of the kind that they recently stamped out. Ilk tells her that he has no desire to overthrow her empire, and Sethra replies that it is as well, for if he was she would have to kill him. Ilk grins and gives her a very shallow bow. They chat. Sethra boasts about her recent trip cross-reality with "her good friend" Mikail the "gentleman-adventurer", and claims to have seen several other realities. Ilk replies that he has just returned to this reality from visiting a few others, and that he definitely prefers this one. They talk about Clarissa, Mikail, and generally don't attack each other. Sethra seems to take offense at his query as to whether she is still limited to movement only within this shadow, and does not answer it.
Ilk sends a magical probe to the site of the battle near Arden, and perceives no immediately hostile beings or other threats. He asks Sethra if she would like to accompany him elsewhere, she declines his invitation, and he teleports to the battlefield.
Back to the index.