Rolled 16, 13 = 29 (2d20)
>>5792261*there's many uses>>5792261>>5792261The Archmage wass OBVIOSULY at the root of this, and TRANSPARENTLY sinister. Oh, true, ALL mages were a little ‘sinister’ by nature, to a layperson. How could they not be, dwelling apart from everyone, else learning secret knowledge of the universe, and using it to control fundamental forces of creation? And, okay, YES, perhaps this manifested sometimes in a certain sort of elitism, intellectual megalomania. But it was a JUSTIFIABLE sort, and an eminently HUMAN (or ‘demihuman’) sort of attitude. You’d encountered Archmage Henzler only once up close and personal, but you still remembered the way she looked… How she moved, spoke, FOUGHT. Whatever she was, it was NOT human, or elven, or justifiable or GOOD. She was bad news, and you were going to uproot her conspiracy of lies and secrets and to find out what she had done to your friend!
Of course, that was easier said than done.
You began by returning to the Tower, telling the middle-aged librarian than your interest in Hawksong genealogy had grown into a general passion for Hawskong HISTORY… And what might a young mage be more curious to learn about than the history of the prestigious academic institution where he himself studied? From there it was simple to return in earnest investigation to those records of admissions and of faculty which you had immersed yourself in when researching Izirina. That was the easy part, and nearly as easy was finding the records on her ‘mother’…
The problem that those records didn’t END.
The elder Henzler was rumoured to be an ancient crone, of course—a truly terrible and powerful witch who, like many a legendary spellcaster, had dedicated at least some of her researches to extending her own life. Her stiff and rigid face was that of a twenty or thirty year old, but even the least-informed pupil of the Tower knew their Archmage was at least a hundred years old…
But she was older than that.
Theresa Henzler was listed as a Head Chimericist, in fact, for at least a hundred years. Prior to that, the records stopped… Only for her to crop up again as a member of the Living Alchemy faculty, a Mage Proctor, five decades before that. And there was an unsettling, eerie, inexplicable gap between the two… No record of gradual ascent up the hierarchy, no other published researches or papers, no work as a Mage Apprentice of a Field Researcher or anything else that might have built her reputation to warrant the promotion. What had she been DOING? And for how LONG?
As unnerving as that absence was, it still led you no closer to uncovering the nature of Izirina and her ailment—if, indeed, that was the right word. Your other studies suffered for a time, stalling out, as you found yourself narrowing your focus to the period of time around Izirina’s birth, or adoption, or… GENESIS.
[Another graduated success roll for research...With a bonus for sticking with it!]
