Quoted By:
Honestly, you are not sure what the best call is here. Maybe you are thinking about this backwards. Instead of deciding now on whether to take the wand or not, and then later decide on whether to poke through Aldoin’s house, perhaps you should decide on going there first, and then on taking the wand or not. Because right now, even with the mess down at the Oilers Wharf, and with the other kind of mess at the Morgue, that unassuming domicile might be the most dangerous place in the entire Mount at the moment. There has to be more Strangeness in that house than there is in the Morgue – in fact, now that you think about it, at the funeral, you did see footfalls that were Strange in the Second Degree, evidence that there were portions of floor in the house that were Strange in the Third Degree, as Strange as the real graven ball was before you cast Salt-Mitigation on it. It is possible that there are spots that are even worse, but Third Degree is bad enough. At that level, you are risking property or even material change of anything that heavily exposed. And if the material properties of a structural beam were to spontaneously change, that could be enough to collapse the house.
Now, ‘risk’ is not ‘guarantee’. And the odds of something like that happening are really minuscule at the Third Degree … but it is possible, and going off of the turnaround time that it takes from death to burial, you know that it has been three days at most since he died – oh, wait, no fours days now. Even if the odds are shit, play them long enough, and eventually …
You realize right then that despite all of the dangers, you are going to go to Aldoin’s House. Setting aside the risk of the place falling apart before you could get there, you are really running out of time to investigate the only potential lead you have to father. That is all there is to it really. And if you are going to be sneaking your way through a presumably occupied house, then you simply cannot do without that wand. Which also means that you cannot afford to take the chance of damaging or destroying it in a Salt-Remediation spell gone wrong. No, you are going to take that fraying thing as is.
So, you go retrieve ‘that fraying thing’ as well as all of the working fuel nodules. As you are going to be doing a lot of climbing between here and there, you not going to be able to put the Socketing Needle in right now. That suits you just fine though – that thing hurts. You change out of your spare dress and into your Spotted Cloak, which is still wet from your half-successful attempts at Self Remediation, then making sure you have the pin-stilettos in your boots, a filled water flask around your waist and the slit purse of salt that you pinched from Aldoin’s coffin in your pockets, along with the Wand of Head Knocking and the fuel nodules to operate it. And of course, your spare dress to change into, the slips for both of the dressmakers, and coins, all in larger denominations.
