NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rolzup" data-source="post: 3391559" data-attributes="member: 10105">Interlude: “Eve of Destruction”Meiji looks around at the others and realizes, even with his normally inwardly-focused senses, that they might not be as happy with his social activities, so without missing a beat he says “But right now there are more pressing matters. Not that I’m ruling out more ‘pressing matters’ later on, if you’re game, but…”Rackhir cuts him off. “What will happen if Nadir gets hold of the Three Sisters?”“Each one will test him, before they’ll allow him through the Not-Door."Salomalle, also known as the Eater of Pain, will measure his freight of suffering, which the Hunger equates with desire, which says a lot about its character, doesn’t it? Malgrazia is the Eater of Memory. She’ll gnaw on his past and by that test his sense of self. Finally, the Eater of Will, Bella Dominatrix, will try her level best to bend him over, metaphysically speaking, of course, for the most part."If Nadir survives, the Hunger may just kill him anyway. Or he might transcend to the limits of his kin and kind, which would mean he’ll leave this world entirely. Or become the immortal witch-king of all the Shirac. It's hard to tell.""Oh, that wouldn't be good at all” says Burne in a rare moment of understatement.“Will he’ll try to bring down the black barrier and release The Hunger?” asks Rackhir.“Release? The Not-Door doesn’t keep The Hunger in; it keeps the riff-raff out. A god doesn’t want to be bothered every minute of the day, especially a mad and starving one. I'm sure all the arcane scribbling on walls the Brotherhood of the Black Worm put there might do something to contain it, or perhaps ‘shape’ is a better word. You should keep in mind that it was the Brotherhood who brought the Hunger to Narayan in the first place. To use, I would imagine.”Meiji clears his throat and says, “Eve - do you have any idea what Nadir’s next move will be?”“His next move will be to discover all he can about me and the threat I might pose.”“I thought you said the two of you knew each other already?” asks the ever-alert Rackhir.“I never slept with him, if that’s what you’re asking. Wait… I don’t suppose it was, was it? I said we saw each other at social functions.”“Where might Nadir go to find more information about you?  Nothing would please me more than to be able to ambush that bastard, rather than the other way around." Meiji pauses to look at Eve and adds, "Well, few things....""He’ll start at the University of Narayan, where he used to teach. Of course, he didn’t leave on the best of terms, what with his attempt to enslave most of the senior faculty when they tried to take the chair of the Department of the Mind's Eye away from him. Magical academic politics is a dirty business."From what I've heard, he didn't kill any of them. And I'm sure no one there bears him any malice. Which is a polite way of saying they're all too cowardly to raise a wizened hand against him. Well, not Dr. Mephisophocles. He, at least, has some backbone. And you should see him tango."Nadir will busy himself with dry tomes and moldy old books; with any luck he'll find a cryptic reference to some beauty from antiquity that'll send him on a golden goose chase to one of the farther corners of the world. Even if he doesn’t, it’ll take him a while before he starts inquiring among the faculty about a certain stylish lady usually seen at the annual Transubstantiationalists Mixer.”Meiji says, "I hope you're right, since that would mean we have some more time before we have to worry about him. I've been planning to visit the University too, to do a little reading up on gate magic. Hopefully I won't run into Nadir there, since Burne would probably kill me if I blew him up before he did, and it would just be embarrassing if Nadir blew me up instead.""Oh, I doubt Nadir could blow you up directly, unless he got control of a grad student from the Department of the Material Physick. Now if he got hold of the captain of the Skulling Team… I shudder to think. Have you even seen the mauls they use to crack open skulls? Absolutely massive. But I'm not so sure he'd even try… he's reluctant to harm his fellow magicians.”Meiji winces a little at the description and then turns in his chair. "Hey, Rackhir - you know what that reminds me of?" After a couple seconds of meeting the ronin's gaze, he evidently rethinks the benefits of mentioning what happened to him with the Tenor's maul. "Um - I see you do, so never mind.”Looking back to Eve, Meiji says “Do you think his reluctance is because he doesn't like to take risks? We have noticed that he takes very careful precautions whenever we've encountered him, making sure to be invisible and flying, and at a fair distance. He seems to rely on his familiar a lot, which I'll be very happy to feed to Abraxas at some point.""I wouldn't say he's averse to risks, no. He broke his oath to the masters of Miir Valley, snuck into the Cabinet of Curiosities then drank from the Goblet of Ire, and threatened a large number of the University’s magical faculty with out-of-bodily harm.”"That bit I can actually sympathize with him for. We don't exactly have Universities and magical faculty in the Empire, but we have some analogues. And they are a significant pain in the ass."</blockquote>

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