Of Bronze and Lead
Twenty Ninth Day of the Second Month 294 AC
You set the parchment with the latest reports from the feywild aside with a sigh of annoyance you feel no need to stifle for once, since there is none but Varys to hear and she already knows your mind as well as you do.
"Will you then bribe the gods to aid you against their lesser kin?" she asks, heedless of the fact that both parties so named would take offense at her words.
"Likely so," you reply ordering your thoughts. "To do it another way would be too much like trying to take keeps by assault in the old way, victory paid in a river of blood and a mountain of treasure at best."
"Yet to unleash doom from afar fueled by the Death of Ruin will not be without cost, their lords will likely take notice," she replies, rising slightly from her perch on the windowsill to look at you in askance. "Do you trust that another of the Great Fiends will be as foolish as Mammon?"
"No," you admit. "But I would rather face a Power in a time and place of my own choosing than in the heart of their domain surrounded by their armies."
Before your familiar can reply, the study door slides open to let in Anu accompanied by the soft white light of the hallway lanterns. Once you might have struggled to read a face of forged bronze rather than flesh, but now you have no issue distinguishing the scores of clues in his posture and expression. He does not look pleased with himself. "I am afraid, my lord, that it is practically impossible to prevent the Efreeti from making use of the Grey Veil in their attacks in that region, from what we have discovered at least."
"How so?" you prompt, motioning to a chair. You are careful to keep any hint of perceived judgement from your tone. Anu and his colleagues in this have done more than enough to compensate for one dead end study, especially since it had been one you had your doubts about to begin with in comparison to more ambitious applications.
The warforged sits with a clank of metal on wood. "It is simple enough to design a short range countermeasure to push back the cloud of lead. The trouble is that the effect does not scale efficiently and the distances are vast. Wisdom Beryl thought she might design a projector of sort to strip the protection against divination and that might see limited use, but if you already know roughly where the enemy is, then the worst threat of the veil is no more."
"I don't suppose you made any progress on replicating the effect then?" you only half-ask. If they had succeeded, Anu would have lead with that. The ability to make entire demiplanes resist divination is tempting almost beyond words.
"We did, after a manner, but it is not practical." At that the artificer unrolls a scroll of arcane symbols and calculations before you.
"Wild magic," you note, running a finger over the line of script in Beryl's hand, still halfway between Lya's looping script and the strict even lettering of military communications. "Wild magic turned against itself by planar confluence. You could not add this to a demi-plane without leaving it to collapse in a matter of weeks or even days."
A Baleful Mirage Progress 27/25 Complete: Minor gains made. Information shared with your allies
As Anu leaves your study, your thoughts turn to another scholar and how he might find his new position. What do you wish to learn from Marwyn?
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OOC: Some poor rolls on an already marginal project. Hope it's not too disappointing. Not yet edited.
