>>6013698Izirina holds out a hand, murmuring the incantation for <Dimension Door> and flourishing her wand to materialize a portal. With a twinned casting of <Summon Elemental>, she summons two small constructs of extraplanar, elemental earth to lift and carry the heavy crate through. Costella gestures to the hobgoblins’ magically-locked box with a flourish and a hopeful, winning smile… But the elders only flinch bad, clunking tongues and hissing.
“You bring the tainted and sacrilegious foreign soil upon our Holy Earth?!”
You grimace, recalling the Neme aversion to extraplanar elementalism too late to warn Izirina and Costella against this form of presentation.
“Still,” you say, “it DOES contain the True Fey we saved from servitude, or worse. And with your permission, and your knowledge, we would work together to free them from this trap.”
“Yes, our knowledge,” muses one of the elders suspiciously. “That is what you are truly here for, isn’t it? Why you came, before you knew we had need of you?”
“We are grateful to you,” one of the other elders—the first female to speak, now speak again—interjects. “Is this tiding a gift, given freely, though? Or is it the case that you have liberated our shared kin, our honoured ancestors, to offer up in TRADE, just as the goblin slavers would have?”
You take a step back at the accusation, aghast. And yet… These Neme are clearly not kindly-disposed to you. If they are not the sort to prevent you swimming in their sacred sands, they are clearly the type to begrudge you the act. If they will not detain you or attack you for your earlier trespasses against the Sylvanfolk and Lunar Eladrin, they know of them, and subsequently suspect you.
You DID come here for their knowledge, and the energy of their locked-away True Fey patrons. What if they… Just refuse to share it?
>The crate, and your aid, is a gift, given freely, without expectation>The elemental fairies’ return is part of a bargain, for help in powering and producing the Unseelie Pseudo-Star>Write-in [careful!] 