Yes.

You okay? We're all kinda - coping by doing, you might have noticed...

I'm not sure how sustainable this is - I've never been mad like this before - but I'm okay for now; if I start having problems I'll do something about it. I do coping-by-doing too.

Alright. Magic defenses on the city, then...and he explains what they've got and how portals could be made to help - the walls can teleport away anyone who touches them, right?

Yup. Also the ground outside the walls, if they want that - can be set up with a trigger if they don't want that always on. She'll have to refresh the spells every so often, though, soil isn't the best substrate for spells. Also they need to specify where 'away' is, they can be various kinds of creative with that, bearing in mind that there's a chance for friendly people to accidentally trigger these spells.

Yeah, that occurred to me. 'into the lake' is one option, for making it hard to attack but not dangerous, or into another world somewhere from which we can see them and retrieve anyone who ended up there accidentally...

Need a safe enough world, for that. We still don't have a good way to check.

Can't do empty ones?

Empty of people, yes. But I don't know if gods count and I can't check for magic at all.

I think I'd take that chance. Most worlds without people probably haven't got gods.

All right. I can't directly target empty worlds, I have to find worlds and then check them for people, so I don't know how long it's going to take for me to have one. I'll work on it when I have time and I can do spells that drop people in the lake in the meantime.

Thanks.

Grin. No problem.

What else, let's see... portals for shooting through, portals for dropping things through, portals for putting people in different parts of the surrounding area...

Whether local magic can detect portals, which answers whether it's safe to portal into Angband directly...

It appears that it can't. She gives them a few portals that watch the room, though, for further testing.

It also occurs to her to check whether she can mage-sense through a portal by sticking a fingertip through it: yes.

And the Enemy's a Vala; we can't count on it that he can't sense them just because we can't. But still, it's something, might be worth a try after more experimentation.

Nod. I still don't know practically anything about how Valar work.

They only have physical forms if they want them, but damaging the physical form can injure them, especially if they've poured a lot of themselves into it. They think weirdly. They have a lot of magic but most of it works slow.

So dropping fallen rocks on their head will help but probably isn't going to do it. Any idea what would?

Opening a portal in the middle of him ought to at least ruin his day. I don't think he can teleport between dimensions so what we eventually will want to do is teleport him somewhere completely safe where nothing can send him back, but I know we don't know how to find those yet...

Nod. We can work on it. Getting the magic detecting spell form might help. I don't know exactly what it can do, but if we're lucky I can use it to check worlds for magic like I can check them for people.

Okay. And that requires sending someone to your world, and checking if it can be acquired over osanwe....

And getting them the light form to learn to cast with first, unless there's someone you're absolutely sure won't be tempted by it.

None of us are going to do something that might get us pointlessly killed.

She makes a dubious face. It happens among kobolds sometimes even with the light form, and I've never actually been a new mage like that, I don't actually know what it's like - I'd rather be safe. Plus we can probably get both of those at the same place, it's not that big of a deal.