Millimax (ᴀᴋᴀ “Kettle Hooves”) @millimax@high.cat

alright this gets meta but hear me out

[dc] means 'destiny crusade' because that's the title
[ooc] means 'out of character' because it's complicated

i'm still gonna be lovable old me but i'm getting the chance to show up in a game @orrery is running for my friends @mawr and @kelseyhusky and @IceWeasel and @kobunny

if you see [dc] but not [ooc] then it's my game-me's journal

if you don't see those it's just me being stoned

i feel i should explain the look of my legs in my user photo here because i'm not a "robot" pony or a "cyborg" or any sort of machine or portion of

i am a living sculpture and i will resculpt myself in copper and porcelain until i am whole even if i have to get there one piece at a time

the big difference here is that the first is a mind-meltingly complicated system of logic circuits and actuators and code

the second is just me haunting a pony-shaped teapot

from outside the arcane congress there's no scrying to find where sykes is within

even inside it'll take heavy effort but leali's specialty is in understanding magical language so she can recite the witness that brelish informant gave and then use that as a scrying focus

when she arrives tomorrow

tonight's plan is to get a good meal with medya then triple-check that all my notes are properly sorted and then maybe – just maybe – get a full night's sleep

i'm not comfortable with that method but if rakela's commander sees enough wisdom in it to allow her to try then it'll have to do

it's not that i'm concerned for sykes – he's dismissed every opportunity to be something other than despicable and now he must be brought to justice before he can cause more harm

but as my great-grandsire "cartwright" (dream in harmony) loved to say

truth built on a lie is like a bridge built on sawdust

rakela showed up after a few hours to reveal her plan

leali still has helpful contacts in the arcane congress so despite her previous experiences there she'll be visiting tomorrow to help us get in so i can publish!

. . . and also because the plan involves finding emmer sykes there and luring him away from aundair with the promise of a full pardon if he agrees to work for breland

but once he's there they'll arrest him instead and hold a public tribunal

while we waited i worked up more detailed plans for medya's gauntlets

i'm glad i have bell's help with the engineering because compared to my boots these will have so much more articulation and so much less physical material to hold it all together

and because it's all fine filigree work i can't use modeling clay to sketch it because that collapses too easily so i've been using stiff wire

which reminds me of my dad's beautiful jewelry work

the roads in arcanix are a tangled mess which also reminds me of home but in a less convenient way

we passed a public portal with a sign claiming it to be "reliable" which was reassuring at first but less so the more i thought about why that sign might need to be there

also distressing was the focus-wrecking sensory assault of flashy magic that nearly every shop and cafe and inn uses to lure folks in

good thing the witch's wand had a ward to keep the sound outside

teleportation is very disorienting for gryphons so we took a minute for medya to recover then headed toward the "witch's wand public house"

on the way we saw the arcane congress

nobody told me that it exists as four huge floating towers in constant motion with a web of bridges that shift to maintain connections

i reluctantly admit that it's even more impressive than the school of magic in viljatown

unlike back home we can't just explain ourselves and expect to be believed

rakela's plan to salvage the situation meant we'd have to travel to arcanix – already our next destination! – and wait for further information there

i know it's for good reasons but i hate being kept in suspense!

after she left we said our thanks to the wayfinders and then zer' teleported us to the circle in the arcanix public library

a very muted-looking rakela brought us some bad news this morning

a member of the "king's lanterns" – breland's special investigators? – saw everything that happened last night and witnessed to the brelish military

we wouldn't have taken the job if we'd known what it really was and rakela understands but it still looks very bad for us

we have enough problems without the brelish authorities thinking of us as the jerks who helped out a war criminal

it was palor who coaxed jorlanna into all of this by insisting it would help her become the next "grand gorgon" – head of house cannith but not a literal gorgon

and that once she'd done what palor and the bleak council (!) wanted then her husband and daughter would be freed from . . . the time-stasis spell they'd been in for thirty years

she took us to her private lab where we saw them frozen in place

so that's what causes bad dreams

sykes commissioned jorlanna to develop the skillshare as a tool for quickly training willing soldiers (sigh) but it sounds like he intends to use it to forcibly control not-so-willing targets which is about a dozen kinds of wrong in one bucket

i later learned that sykes has many more buckets-of-atrocity where that came from but for everyone's health i won't talk about those – it's bad enough that they're in my head now

it gets worse

no guests were injured so we did well but spark noted that sometime during the fight gwyr disabled one of the cannith door guards (not dead just drugged) and slipped into the restricted area beyond

then "d'cannith véora" – one of the others in the secretive meeting going on alongside the party – revealed to us that a very dangerous protoype artifact called a "skillshare" was stolen so now we have a strong guess for what gwyr was up to

at one point there was a loud snap and everything went bright grey for a few moments

i came to my senses pretty quickly but with ringing ears and tingly-numb left foreleg and much soreness around that shoulder

medya (and the scorch marks) said i'd been hit with a bolt of lightning!

that's twice now but i'm glad to report that it hurt much less than the first time

it still scared the shit out of me (no not literally that's an idiom)

we were only there to keep the party from being disrupted so of course that's what happened anyhow

the short form is that the reidrans started to attack zer' and then a bunch more showed up despite the outside guards

jorlanna and sykes had already disappeared off to some secretive meeting in another guarded room but we still had to keep folks from getting hurt so we scrambled to repel the attackers and get everyone to safety

worse yet is that an ambassador from "all of sarlona" – zer explained that this claim pretends his people don't even exist – showed up with three large reidran bodyguards who were just like those husks-not-people we fought in wroat

jorlanna made her appearance and gave a speech (about as well as i give speeches) and it was about alliances and innovation and common goals which might have been great news except for her worrying taste in allies

dowser and zer' can do the same sort of mental link so they worked together to connect all of us

that's how the others filled me in on the more interesting people who showed up

for example dowser was clear about not liking the presence of professor "emmer sykes" who is an alchemist who made some not-very-nice things for cyre's military

and he was a little nervous about "senna redeker" who is a prominent knight in the aundair royal court

after lunch we picked up our formalwear and i have to say the cape actually looks pretty good on me and it definitely accentuates my legs so i'm happy with that

and after a couple hours of preparation – and practice for how exactly i would avoid confronting jorlanna about the whole patent issue because yes medya i know this would be a very bad time for that discussion – we went back to the site but this time looking much fancier

after the planning we got some lunch

this region takes pride in their cuisine and their big specialty is a mushroom and rice dish that i can't get enough of

medya and i shared that and a salad of greens and pears and walnuts and some amazing cheese

and then fruit tarts that i wish i could share with my cousin "bran" so she could try to replicate them

is it obvious i've been a little hungrier than usual? something about my new legs?

dowser himself admitted those plans would probably go out the window if anything happened – "once the enemy shows up it's all down to training and practice"

my training and practice are more in how to tolerate fancy social functions than in how to repel would-be enemies and nobody here takes unicorns seriously enough for me to qualify as "visible muscle"

so medya and i decided we'd mingle with the crowd and simply be ready as needed

it's still strange but comforting to wake up and feel that my dreams were difficult but to not actually remember them so i started the day extra thankful to selena for banishing whatever nastiness came up

but we'll come back to the topic of things that cause bad dreams

this morning involved a tour of the ballroom area followed by a couple hours of planning out who would be best positioned where and how to communicate

follow me here

necromancy is used as the term for the school of magic that includes healing and resurrection

but other schools are called evocation and abjuration and transmutation and conjuration and divination so what the heck

animation

and now you can have your evil re-animators which sounds about twenty percent cooler