Walkabout investigators, late week 3

[leftbehindagain]

We have a slight problem, guys. You know that dragon-hunt meeting at the beginning of the week?

The dragon organised it. I've bumped into the kid who knows that actual person a couple times, and she said she spotted the difference right away. It's probably too late to do much with that information, but I'm almost certain it tried to focus people on the Magicians' Quarter on purpose.

I'd bet it's anywhere but there, and I bet it won't be there much in the next few weeks.

Comments

[comebewe]

[He's not planning on getting hurt. Although to be fair, he never plans on getting hurt, and that particular plan seems to pan out way less often than he'd like...]

We got the impression that all the others like her were cousins. My guess would be that she's something local to here, but I don't exactly have any experience with Trumps to tell the difference.

[leftbehindagain]

...Huh. I'm inclined to say it's not a Trump thing, since them referring to each other as family isn't consistent.

She didn't say anything about cousins to me. How'd it come up?

[comebewe]

She's a chatty kid.

[which was code for, "Matthew's not so keen on volunteering that this came up largely because she recognised something similar in them"]

They also don't seem to be keen on the dragon.

[leftbehindagain]

[Yeah, at some point he's going to ask about 'people-person,' but a public network channel's not the place for that.]

Well, hopefully we can make it an 'enemy of our enemy' situation, at least until the damn dragon's out of the way and we're gone.

[comebewe]

We are all for enemies of the dragon.

[leftbehindagain]

Try not to completely destroy it?

[comebewe]

What exactly are we supposed to do instead? Deliver it to Dragon Prison?

[leftbehindagain]

The dragon's clearly sentient. If we can manage to get a hold of it long enough to talk to it, we might be able to figure out what it wants and get to a better solution than wholesale destruction.

[comebewe]

You want to talk to it? The thing that stole my face? That shoved me into a goddamn tomb? That left us there, paralysed, for an entire week? Why don't you try thinking, just for a second, about exactly what kind of hell that was like?

You think that it being sentient makes any of that better? That we should all just buddy up to it and make friends? You can have fun doing that if you want, but we want it dead.

[leftbehindagain]

There's a reason I said try not to obliterate it. I can't blame you in the least if you do, and you probably won't be the only one who wants to.

[comebewe]

We don't see any reason at all to try that.

[wholeheaded]

[ if Ambrose were the type to say oh shit he would be saying it a lot right now. instead - verbally at least -there's a lot of panicked squawking about all of them getting sent to the nome king's kitchen on a platter. psychically, he's a little more composed. ]

Iluminants. The Illuminated. They're a group of incredibly powerful mages who call each other "cousin" and last time we were here they nearly got annihilated. I was infiltrating as one and...

They know about the Trumps and see them as a threat. They know about us.

[leftbehindagain]

...well, crap. [Okay, if he can manage to keep up his own cover now, he's going to be doubly impressed. But in general, that... bodes.]

At least she's not a Trump? But this doesn't sound all that great either.

[wholeheaded]

It's... it's really not.

[ as his reply to Matthew will demonstrate. ]

[comebewe]

Just mages? Nothing else? [Power is one thing, but there was more than that going on with Maria]

Do they think that we are a threat?

[wholeheaded]

No, not a threat. Just pawns of the threat, from what I remember. [ which could be Violet talking; he'd considered the Travelers an amusing curiosity more than anything.]

As for the Illuminants, they're archmages, really, they're... sort of elemental beings that hold power over different aspects of the world. And they're color coded along the light spectrum, so Green is living things, hope, youth, stuff like that. I have no idea about the kittens, though, the Green I knew was more plant-y.

[comebewe]

Right. [And they consider the Trumps a threat too, so as long as these Illuminants don't start lumping the Travelers in with them, well, they can dislike the Trumps as much as they want]

So basically they're...representations, let's say, of the colour magic thing people have got going on here.

[wholeheaded]

Pretty much, yes. The full embodiments of a color's potential, and exponentially more powerful than any local color mage.