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Here is a house.
It is pretty and trim and green-and-cream and really ought not to be able to hold itself up like that, and yet here it is, somehow defying the laws of architecture. It is surrounded by a neatly bordered garden of ornamental and useful plants of all sorts: here vegetables, there herbs, there spell components, there rows of flowers.
There is a sign out front. It says only: Magic. Not, Beware, Magic or Magic Emporium or anything like that. Just: Magic.
Sitting on top of this sign is a cream cat with smoke-dark points of color on each paw, his ears, and his face and tail.
All in all, you could be forgiven for thinking that a witch lives here.
thaumobabble
thaumobabble
Bella produces a ball of thread, hands an end to Tony - who's less likely to suddenly need her hands free - and unravels it into the cave. (This is a standard cave precaution if you don't know where you're going.) It's a smallish cluster of caves, not just a single cavern nor yet a node of a large network like the Caves of Chance or the Caves of Fire and Night, and she pokes her head into each of them, not explaining herself to the wizards or their female and therefore nonwizard family members. None of them tries to attack her. She rolls up the thread and comes out again.
"There are some wisps coming in, but it's unused residue, not uprooted useful magic. The same sort of stuff my marble grabs," Bella reports when she's retrieved the end of her thread from Tony.
"There are some wisps coming in, but it's unused residue, not uprooted useful magic. The same sort of stuff my marble grabs," Bella reports when she's retrieved the end of her thread from Tony.
thaumobabble
"...You'll just leave us be?" asks the woman suspiciously. "Are you going to tell the Queen?"
thaumobabble
"Yes, but - are you authorized - to decide that sort of thing?" asks the woman, cringing as she utters the impertinent question.
thaumobabble
The woman backs away a few steps, then turns and hurries into the caves.
"There's some twenty adult wizards, half with wives and a third with one or more kids, as a cursory estimate," Bella says. "What would they be hiding from other wizards for? I don't get it."
"There's some twenty adult wizards, half with wives and a third with one or more kids, as a cursory estimate," Bella says. "What would they be hiding from other wizards for? I don't get it."
calendarofcrime
"I do not know," says Sherlock. "Mother will likely want to send someone to find out."
thaumobabble
"I'm sure that will thrill the little wizard colony," says Bella dryly. "They were scared half to death. Do you suppose they had anything to do with the one we encountered earlier?"
calendarofcrime
"Mother will send someone who is not as terrifying as I am," says Sherlock. "He was almost certainly a member of the group, but not a close relative of either of the ones I met."
thaumobabble
"These ones didn't try to attack any of us, even though they had numbers," Bella observes. "Maybe he was looking for them, not with them."
thaumobabble
"I suppose we could go back and describe him and see if they say 'yes, that's our cousin' and commence mourning or 'good riddance, that was our unexplained enemy' and commence celebrating."
calendarofcrime
"It is possible that if it is the first one, someone might attack me. I prefer to avoid that."
