>>6070166There’s an old Stranger saying you’ve heard before, a bit of wisdom passed across a world of “demons” into yours even if most people that use it are just young nobles trying to sound smart at the Academy but you digress. While you can’t remember the specifics of the statement or what it’s called, most of your memory in that era was dedicated to magic study (ugh) and learning how to wield more weapons. Did you know that the reason elven bowmen appear slender is because they use a combination of magical reinforcements and strict dieting so they do not gain the muscle mass of a regular bowman? Oh, you’re off-topic. Anyway! The saying goes that you should look for the solution to a problem with the fewest number of variables, or something like that. Currently, you know of two variables, the first being that the manor is filled with magic-nulling stones and the second is that the fire must be magical in order to burn for so long at such intensity despite constant efforts to quench it.
Now you could theorize many possible variables from this, perhaps the anti-magic stones are set in a certain way that allows for magic to be cast should the user channel it just right. Maybe the fire itself is not special and there’s a complex scene of machinations that has been constructed below the estate- Wait stop, get to the simple answer already, Lorina! There are multiple magic users in the area, it’d be a good idea to get a read of them since if one of them is at fault for this disaster, you’re only working with three total variables. Sometimes your intelligence is frightening, but it should be. You are Lorina de Lindan.
So in all your infinite wisdom, you join the bucket brigade. You get a few glares and a muttering of “Finally…” As you and Marie fall in line. None of these peons truly know that a royal has lent down a magnanimous hand to assist them in their plight of passing along buckets of water. For soon, your deductive skills will relieve them of this task. You only need to figure out which one of the casters gathered here is the culprit, or if they are here at all.
The first one you rule out is the elf, he’s sweating far too much from the excretion of physical labor. Again, his kind greatly pride themselves on their psyche as in elven society excretion is seen as a sign of lower status, it is much the same as in human society now that you think about it but multiplied in their case. At first, you’d think he’d be faking it after all what fool wouldn’t use muscle reinforcements? Then you get a look at the man wearing the floppy hat, you see true weariness in his black irisless eyes and it seems his magic exhaustion level is high. The boyish fool probably never even learned that area of magic, deeming it to be beneath his role as a mage. A decently common story among their kind, or at least the few you met at the Academy.
