Lorenzel and Ramanzel

[Drannin]

Argus stared, his mind registering a faint white noise. Something like 'burrrrr....'

Okay. There was a tiny woman in the cage. With wings.

"Ufah," Argus said, rather sagaciously. He looked up at Sasha, who was staring at him with hopeful eyes. "Well, I see something." He stared at the tiny woman, who murmured and turned over in her sleep. "A little woman with wings?" Sasha's expression of sheer relief was actually rather reassuring. "Okay... so yeah." What really could be said here?

As one, they leaned in close to stare at the woman. Weave, what would one say?!

"She's cute," Argus said lamely.

Hopefully something better than that.

[Templar771]

(OOC: sorry for the inactivity.)

Cit sat at the desk in his room whistling quietly to himself as he tinkered with some dwavern gadget. It was nice of them to give him a gift as an apology...of course they needed a little persuasion as to letting him and Felix go. The bones would heal,fingers can be reattached and no one was killed which was the main thing.

They probably wouldn't mind about the dwavern tech; they didn't even know what half of the stuff did. Philistines, Cit sighed and shook his head. The dimension bag would come in handy for storage and the dwavern tech would keep him occupied for ages. He picked up another tool and began to delicately take the device apart.

[Graybeard]

Sister Rose stared open-mouthed at the fairy. I've never seen anything like this. I've never even heard of anything like it, outside children's stories... And then it occurred to her: she had seen something like it.

It had been a pure accident, dating back to when she was a captain on her way up in the Veracian military. Like most of the officers in the special operations command (and she couldn't really blame them for excluding Kenny...), she'd taken a class in the Veracian War College on the history of Tsuiraku -- the real history, not the pap that had been dished up in her public-school days. That, of course, required going to the Heretic Knowledge Vault, because that was where the good stuff was. Of course, she hadn't had access to the whole Vault; it was rumored that absolutely nobody did, not even the Patriarch himself. However, she and her classmates had been cleared for access to the "Forbidden Knowledge of Tsuiraku" wing. It took a while to convince the old geezer stationed in that wing that a mere woman (horrors!) might be afforded such knowledge; who knows, the truth about Tsuiraku might cause sterility, or behaving like a man, or some such horrible thing, mightn't it? Eventually, she did manage to get into the Tsuirakuan collection.

Which, by and large, she found terminally boring. It was a standard trope of bad military fantasy novels that you could just go into a place like that and, lo and behold, the Big Military Secret of the Universe would be there, just waiting for you to find it and do something stupid. Reality didn't work that way. Rose knew from personal experience that the overwhelming majority of "sensitive" documents covered subjects no more exciting than supplies lists for bases, security precautions to prepare for visiting high mucky-mucks, duty rosters, security analyses for bases abandoned thirty years ago. So also here; she couldn't believe anybody would be titillated by the vast piles of Tsuirakuan financial ledgers, interviews of low-level Tsuirakuan prisoners (any high-powered enough to know anything really interesting would go to great lengths, including self-immolation, to avoid getting captured), and so on. Or so she thought ... until she came across one book that had been mis-catalogued.

In retrospect, she had no idea why she'd picked up the Tsuirakuan book with the bland title "Traditional Elven Art." It clearly had nothing to do with why she was there, she wasn't particularly interested in either art or the elves, and why was such a bland subject restricted to the Heretic Knowledge Vault anyway? But when she started to peruse the thing, she figured it out: this book wasn't so much about elven art as about elven religion -- and that was a subject that simply Was Not Discussed in the Church of Luminosita.

And nestled in that book, among the plates of elven sculpture, tapestries and paintings liberated from Luminosita alone knew where, were depictions of the two elven gods (or whatever they were), surrounding by hovering swarms of fairies.

She'd had to hurriedly shelve the book when a particularly pretentious classmate approached, and she'd never gone back to the subject. However, the various artistic depictions stayed in the back of her mind. And here, looking at this small -- person -- in the cage, the memory of that one particular tapestry emerged.

Argus and Sasha seemed to be speaking in low voices, probably for fear of waking the small being up, so she quietly tiptoed back out of the room, to where Brother Miguel and Lillith were waiting, puzzlement on their faces. "Lillith?" she called quietly. "There's something in here that I'd like you to see..."

[Sareth]

The peculiar tilt to Lillith's head as she looked at Sister Rose made it clear that Sister Rose' surprise was not properly concealed. She glanced at Brother Miguel out of the corner of her eye, then stepped forward.

"Yes, Sister Rose?" she asked, her voice clearly cautious. Sister Rose reflected that at least it wasn't the deadened sulking thing it had been. Apparently Lillith was still too energized by her sense of... whatever it was over the storm to have remembered that she was mopping. The girl stepped up next to Sister Rose, a quizzical look on her face, then glanced into the room.

The sound of air being sucked through teeth made a hiss like an outraged viper. Lillith's eyes had gone wide as saucers, and her back rigid. "PAEDAGOGUSI? HERE?"

[Drannin]

Argus raised a hand, eyes still lock on the... fairy. "Um, what's a paedagogusi, please?"

[Sareth]

"Spirits, of a sort," Lillith replied, her voice hushed. There was a reverence in her voice, but something else besides. Something less pleasant. But speculation would have to wait, as Lillith continued on. "I'm... not sure this is the right place to tell the story," her eyes slid over to the Veracians, "or that you would believe me if I told you," now her eyes slid to the Tsuirakuans. "But..." She seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then her face took an uncharacteristically determined set to it, one they hadn't seen before. She half pushed, half eased Argus and Sasha into the room, then pulled Sister Rose into the room in a way that did not brook question. Brother Miguel followed along, drug in simply by the emotional suction she seemed to create by her sudden growth of what seemed to be a spine.

Glancing quickly up and down the hall, Lillith closed the door and latched it behind her. She eyed the room.

"I do not know what your church teaches you," Lillith said, staring at Rose in a challenging fashion similar to the way she had first viewed the Veracians what seemed like years ago. "Nor do I know what your scholars teach you," she said, her eyes no less challenging when turned on the Tsuirakuans. "What ever it is, that..." she pointed at the cage... "is proof that both are wrong. Because the Paedagogusi were created by Anilis and Senilis, the lost gods of the elves. They taught the elves everything, back before humans or trolls walked the earth. And then, when the gods went away, the Paedagogusi went too."

She glowered at the cage, and her voice was almost a growl as she asked the sleeping figure, "Where are the other four?"

[Graybeard]

"I can confirm this, at least in part," Sister Rose said softly, surprising everyone else in the room (except the sleeping fairy, of course). The story of the elven art was coming back to her now, meshing with some things she'd learned as she was getting ordained in the Reformed church, and she was going to have to choose her words carefully ...

"There was a big foofaraw in the Veracian Church about two hundred years back, when the -- manifestation of Luminosita was sent to check on the elves. Until then it had always been believed that the elven creation myths were exactly that: myths. But it didn't take many interactions with the elves until it was realized that there were actually elves out there, just a few of them, who had seen the Paedagogusi. That, to put it mildly, caused some revision in the way the elven gods were viewed."

Brother Miguel got very quiet; he knew part of the story, but Rose was filling in some blanks he'd long wondered about. She continued, "The thing is, though: it was rapidly concluded, based on I don't know what evidence, that whatever the elven gods were all about, they didn't have much relevance to us humans. Actually, I take that back: I do know some of the evidence. I read a book once --" that art book, and I'm starting to wonder if my soul was in danger for having read it -- "that made the point that in the elven representations of their history, they never presented their gods, including the Paedagogusi, on the same piece of work that also contained humans. It's like we weren't part of the elven creation, and they weren't part of ours."

Miguel nodded vigorously. "Now I begin to understand some things," he said. "We of the Reformed branch, which got going right about the time this happened -- and by the way, did you know that one of Rose's ancestors was among our founders? -- we found one way of dealing with some of the issues that posed. The Orthodox branch found a different way: denial. That, of course, was the simpler way ... and as usual, that meant that it won, when things began to filter down from the thinkers of the Church to the public."

Rose started to say something in response to Miguel's point, but the words caught in her throat: the fairy-like being, whether Paedagogusi or something else, was showing signs of waking up.

[Viking-Sensei]

Sasha hugged Argus, then Rose and Miguel, then even a slightly unwilling Lillith. "I'm not crazy! That, or we're all crazy... either way... yay!"

Compassion rolled over, stretched, and opened her eyes... and wow, there were an army of giants surrounding her, looking down on her. "Heeeeey... everybody..." She replied sleepily. "Can I have five more minutes? And why am I in a cage?"



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A chill blew down Cit's spine, and the door to his room shuddered for a moment. "I wouldn't dismantle that one if I were you." A pleasant and calm voice suddenly said from behind him in his room. "That piece you're playing with now is actually a dwarven bomb... a rather large one... and you're about to activate it."

[Templar771]

Cit stopped whistling but didn't turn around. "You could have knocked." He replied calmly. The figure behind him said nothing and Cit continued talking "I suppose you can read the dwavern on the side then." He retracted the tool he was using and inserted another one "Fortunately I can as well which is why I am removing the fuse."

He had memories of when he first understood the need to be able to read dwavern; he wondered if they ever repaired that bridge. Cit continued to mutter to himself as he began taking parts off the bomb "Take of the primary shell and stabiliser....then remove the primer.....and then." He picked up a pair of pliers and reached into the device and withdrew a small tube filled with a blue liquid which had a faint glow to it. When the tube was halfway out however there was a small click and a ticking noise could be heard.

"Ah it's a Mk 4 not a Mk 2." He announced to the figure calmly "They have a back up system not as big as an explosion but enough to vaporise this building. Hope the owner has insurance .I need you to go into my bag by the bed there and take out the metal box, quickly but be careful." He then gently put the tube of liquid down on the table and picked up another tool and then prised of a section of the metal casing of the bomb. The ticking was now increasing in rate and a bead of sweat appeared on Cit's forehead as he reached in with the pliers and pulled out and small whirring device.

The ticking stopped and Cit lobbed the small device out of the window it then exploded in the field below the window. Fortunately the only casualty was a scarecrow who now only had one arm. Cit then pulled out another but small tube of the same glowing liquid and put it on the table. He then opened the metal box and then placed the tubes with several others in some cotton padding and locking them in place with a latch. He then closed the lid of the box and turned to the figure. "Now how did you get in here?"

[Viking-Sensei]

"Let's just say doors like me." The man said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and examining one of Cit's tools. "Fancy setup you've got here. I would, however, have just done this..."

The man leveled his hand at one of the dwarven trinkets Cit had moved his fingers ever so slightly - the device came apart, spinning around in mid-air as the pieces unfastened themselves and entered a loose orbit around the central core. Another twitch of the fingers and the device re-formed, each piece carefully rotating around and fitting back into the place it'd come from. The device fell softly back into Cit's bag and began ticking.

"Names are highly overrated, but if I must have one, you can call me Van Ralein. I am but a humble musician who was passing through when I felt the power of your devices and decided to indulge my curiosity. Sorry for the intrusion... and don't worry, that one's suspposed to tick. It's a clock. Now, information for information, may I ask where you got such wonderful... toys?"