>>5793476“A secret immortal secondary body, to transfer her consciousness into upon her already-far-from-timely demise!” your father cried, slapping both palms upon the table.
“…What?” you balked, and then added: “Be quieter!”
“Right,” your father whispered, chagrined. “Sorry, I got carried away. It gets the blood burning, all this talk of evil sorcerers scheming to take over the world! Why, it reminds me of when I met your mother…”
“That’s a hurtful stereotype,” you pouted. “Mages aren’t all evil schemers, you know.”
“Well obviously not, no, of course not!” your father hastened to amend. “Present company excluded, of course, and your friends from before.”
You winced a little, and admitted: “Well, Izirina Henzler WAS one of the friends who came with me.”
“…Oh,” said Rudolfo van Houtzmann then, and then mor knowingly and with half-lidded eyes and a sly smirk. “OH.”
You didn’t like that tone.
“So there’s a damsel-in-distress at the centre of this caper, ey wot?” he said. “A princess in the castle, for my son the shining knight, is it?”
“We’re just....”
What? FRIENDS? Well, that remained to be seen.
“I’m not a knight, or any other sort of man-at-arms.”
(At least you’d managed to learn how to regrow a limb with <Monstrous Regeneration> by the year’s end, which you supposed was as good a remedy to a knight’s blade—or a secretive and scaley-skinned killer—as any)
“Well, we can fix that!” you father cheered you up—or, well, presumably thought that’s what he was doing.
“I don’t NEED sword-training,” you protested. “I need your HELP.”
“Anything,” Rudolfo van Houtzmann said, and you could tell that in that moment he meant it. “What would you have us do?”
You’d considered that, of course, before arranging the meeting. Your weeklong break in the school-year was only a few days away, and you planned to make good use of it to begin untangling this mess of serpent-tangled threads. And to do that, you’d need to…
>Infiltrate the lower levels of the Mage’s Tower, to find the secrets in the lower levels where the chimerical labs were kept>Sneak up into the upper levels of the Tower, where the senior faculty—and Izirina—lived and kept their private affects>Delve down into the sewers, where old tabloids said that the rat-monsters and snake-people were living and dragging hapless people two decades prior… When Izirina was born or made>Journey out towards the Goblin Wastes, the barren and rocky plains between the civilized Northwest and distant and exotic East, where goblinoids dwelled—including those expelled from Hawksong as alleged conspirators to the demonist plot>Write-in 