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| 1G Conch |
Inside the shoe-box was a conch shell; about the size of a lady's shoe. There was a note too. It was from Sly Dunbar: "Use this to contact me. Sly Dunbar, Liaison of the Wizards' Guild". Attlee held it to his ear.
"Hello?" he said.
After a short time came the reply.
"Dis is Sly Dunbar," said a voice in a strong Pensive accent. "Liaison to de Wizards' Guild. Whom be I addressin'?"
"Um, Attlee."
They talked a bit. This conch was a communication device. It was a "1G conch" which meant it was only good for communications to and from its twin back at the Guild. If Dunbar needed to contact the party, he could make it scream like a klaxon horn. Similarly, Attlee could return the screaming-favour by pressing on the shell end.
Worried about being eavesdropped upon, the group insisted that Attlee store the conch down in the vault.
Nevertheless, Huilam [Jamie] and Tylin [Ian] soon used the conch to speak to Dunbar to arrange a meeting at the Wizards' Guild; they had some more points to discuss about Daisy.
So, those two left for the Guild. Attlee, with his powerful magic (the IMAG skull), was not welcome!
The remaining party split up into two squads.
Burrito [Darryl], Sorrow [Jeff], Attlee, Argile [Richard] & Dee Dee [Steven] went to stake out Daisy's house in Duke Street; day and night.
El Cid [Shane], Moonlight [Chris] & Ronny [Deacon] went searching down the sewers looking for Simone's jewellery (which El Cid had wrapped up and dumped last score, after they captured her). He was hoping it would be stuck in the sewers or floating in the Scab River.
Down in the sewers, they found a hot trail [good rolls], and sure enough, Simone's robe had caught on a piece of reinforcing rod protruding from one of the exit pipes where the Duke Street sewer emptied into the Scab River. They unwrapped it, and inside was all Simone's jewellery and the brooch, safe and sound.
To find a safe place to hide it, in case it was tracked, the three headed to Moonlight's Caribou Gorn Grove in the Holbein woods, to Moonlight's charred log cabin (where Dee Dee had been burned by the wizards, last score).
El Cid and Ronny then left Moonlight, and journeyed back to town to tell the rest of the group the good news: that the jewellery had been recovered so quickly.
Exactly now, Huilam and Tylin were chatting away to Dunbar, when a generic wizard sidled into the
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| Sly Dunbar, WG liaison |
"Simone's gear...," he said hoarsely. "... moved ... Caribou Grove."
Huilam jumped up and interrupted before Dunbar could answer.
"Excusez-moi messieurs!" he said in panicked elvish. "We... um.. know of zis."
Dunbar and the other wizard spun and stared at him, slack-jawed.
"You do, mon?" said Dunbar. "We be locatin' de felons who stole Simone's stuff."
"Zat would be our group," said Huilam. "We were.. uh searching for it. Part of ze investigation of Simone."
"Then I won't be callin' in a fire strike. Who will the Hit Team meet when they arrive?"
"Zat would be Moonlight, El Cid and Ronny."
"Recover the items," Dunbar told the other wizard. "But leave the group unscathed."
The other wizard nodded and left.
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A short time later, the generic wizard arrived back, carrying all of Simone's jewellery.
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| Simone Ender's 2G Brooch |
"Your elven druid friend is okay," said the wizard to Huilam. "We didn't kill him."
Dunbar picked out the brooch from the pile of Simone's costly jewellery, and gave it to Huilam.
"That's a 2G Brooch," he said. "Is better than the conch. 2G means it goes tru' an 'Exchange', so you be callin' the exchange lady and you be tellin' her who you want to talk to. An she put you tru'. The gems be the 'go' and 'stop' buttons."
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Later, Huilam used the brooch to contact Daisy.
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| Daisy Crown |
They asked all they could about her movements, her links to Simone and Dalila, and such stuff. She didn't have any suspicions about her position on the council being compromised either.
"They would just replace us," she said.
But all these political ramifications had been discussed last time, so they didn't go into that again.
Daisy was into luxuries like Simone, but not so much into Furs R Us. However, her vice was pleasure. But they could not wheedle from her the exact ... flavour.
They got onto talking about the Teleport spells. There were a many variants of the spell that Daisy was happy to wax on loquaciously all about. This was her specialty, after all.
- Dimension Door Teleport, which was a single-word, self, short range (200 paces), line-of-sight spell.
- Get Me Home Teleport; a trigger word teleports (only) the wizard to a pre-defined location. From anywhere in the Known World.
- Risky Teleport, which used the WGPS (Wizards' Guild Positioning System). This coordinate system allows any location in the Known World to be targetted accurate to a finger-width*. But this spell had a tangible risk (about 2%) of missing the target and arriving in a random spot: normally distributed with a Standard Deviation of exp(pi)paces (about 23m). Can take a guest too.
- Safe Teleport, which used the WGPS with no risk. Can take a guest.
- Succour. [Like a HP port-key], an object would be imbued with the magic and when touched or triggered, behaves like a Get Me Home. Can take guests if all hold the toucher.
With all these spells, the destination site needs to be clear. Gasses are pushed away with a loud pop. Teleporting into solids means instant death. Teleporting into liquids also does not work because liquids are not compressible and the expansion of the arriving body occurs faster than the speed of sound through the liquid, so from the teleporter's point of view, it might was well be a solid.
* = WGPS uses polar coordinates plus height. The world is an infinite plane but only illuminated where the fighting gods REAL and IMAG roll around the Great Circle. This circle is 5000 stades in radius. [Treat a "stade" here as a kilometre.] Scholars (FW priests) have determined that "significant life" only extends 20,000 stades from the centre of the circle. The fighting gods are up at 3500 stades high. Thus, this defines the parameters of the WGPS 30-digit coordinate system. One coordinate is distance from the centre of the Great Circle and can be expressed in 10 digits. The second coordinate is the angle, zero degrees being the Specularum meridian. It is expressed as 11 digits (degrees, arc-minutes, arc-seconds, milli-arc-seconds and tenths). At 20,000 stades, one tenth of a milli-arc-second is about 10mm. The third coordinate is the height - another 9 digits required. The centre of the Great Circle moves slowly in a random walk (2.5m a day), so WGPS coordinates are based on a "WGPS Origin" rather than the actual origin.
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| Lido |
Lido was saying (in Attlee's head): "You have to go and see Clara. Otherwise she will cause trouble."
"No no!" grumbled Attlee. "We are not working for IMAG again. The group said a clear no. No."
"There will be trouble," said Lido. "She is threatening me. Are you threatening me? Are you?"
"You can talk to her?"
"No," said Lido. "But the Foundling can. I talk to the Foundling. Words. Feelings. I get them all. Clara talks to them and I hear."
"'Them'? Who is them?"
"The Foundling. They use the 'they' pronoun."
"How long have you been able to do this?" asked Attlee.
"For always."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"You never asked!"
"Well, then tell them to tell her no."
There was a short delay.
"The Foundling ...they say, she ... is angry. Clara is angry."
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Burrito, Sorrow, Attlee, Argile & Dee Dee had been staking out Daisy's residence all day. There were always two or three gardeners. It didn't take long to work out that the garden was very well-kempt and that they were all just doing busy-work.
After dark, the gardeners left (two were followed - neither went to the Wizards' Tower). Lights came on in the house, the same as previous nights, and (legitimate) shadows moved around inside.
Moonlight joined this group after dark, and cast a Detect Magic from the road. The spell effect covered the whole front yard and the front of the house. There was no magic anywhere in the yard, and nothing on the house structures (windows, doors, walls, roof). Only some items inside the place.
Dee Dee also had a look around in the Duke Street sewers adjacent to the property, but there were no pipes that headed off under Daisy's house.
Later on in the night, Sorrow, Attlee and Burrito sneaked on to the property and around the back, quiet as the grave. There was an outhouse out the back. Presumably it wasn't plumbed into any sewer lines.
Sorrow found a good hiding place in some shrubbery over the back fence in the adjacent property (which had a house of similar generic style and wealth), and observed all night.
They returned home just before light.
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The next morning, Esme came in with the mail from the Luscious Pixie notice board.
There was a terse message from Lieutenant Chung: "Get here now!"
So, the whole group turned up to the Knives. The news wasn't good.
"You know how we were making you a lasso to stop Daisy Crown from teleporting?" asked Chung.
Nods all around.
"Well," he said. "The wizard who we commissioned to build that ... is no more. His whole place has
been burned. No sign of him. No body even. Any ideas?"
Shaking heads all around.
"Do you trust your staff, Lieutenant?" said Huilam."Only three people in the Knives know of these plans," said Chung. "Me, my PA Sandra, and my assistant, Corporal Evans. And I would trust them both with my life. Are you sure of your crew?"
Nods all around. But not-so-certain nods.
"This puts a brake on the mission," said Chung. "Do you feel confident you can take Ms Crown without the lasso? It would be possible, but I suggest we... you ... find and seal the leak first before we go further."
Nods all around. They slunk off home.
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During the ensuring “discussions” back at base, the conch blared its klaxon sound. Dunbar had some urgent news, but wouldn't say it over the conch. So Huilam and Tylin went to see him.
Sly Dunbar told them that the Guild had an anonymous tip-off, last night, that there was a "wizard of interest" hired by "certain parties" (it did not say), "doing things to compromise Daisy Crown's location" and then passed on some other critical information. Using this, and their own location magic, they homed in on an address in Downtown, and sent in a hit team.
A freelance wizard named Wilson lived there, but he had magical alarms and traps, so it ended in a fire-fight, literally. Wilson was killed and the whole building was consumed in a fiery conflagration. But the wizards did recover his charred body.
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Back at the base, talk was prolific. Did they have a leak? [They all knew about Attlee's skull out-of-character, of course, and suspected the leak was via Clara, but none of this was in-character.]
It was decided that maybe it was them, especially since there were only three knives who knew. After all, they did have some auxiliary staff, like Esme and the SAT secretary, and the Insight and Prowess experts often popped in and out.
So, it was decided that Dee Dee would use her Detect Lie feat on everyone. The question was, "did you betray the plan to make the lasso to the Wizards' Guild?"
Everyone said "NO" of course, including Attlee. And no-one was lying. [Attlee had no idea even if it was the IMAGs who betrayed anyway, even in-character].
That cleared everyone except Dee Dee herself... Or Dee Dee and an associate whom she covered.
I suspect the IMAG connection. Who is to say what would or would not be out of character for a talking skull, a demon or an IMAG priestess?
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