how not to do interworld contact | Glowfic Constellation

There are some various constraints, but it does!

She is totally trained to fight field mages, but she really needs more affordances than she has to do that well.

She's pretty sure he's going to counter her, and she doesn't know what permissions he has. She attempts to render him unconscious anyway.

He doesn't counter that.

But someone starts trying to magic the blood in the handler's body much, much colder than it should be. It's impossible to tell who's doing that. It's like the answer is hidden by some kind of magic.

Unconscious mages can't do magic. He's pretty sure of that. That means there's another mage here!

"Defense on me!!"

She reaches out. She starts countering.

(...Someone who can do that from a distance is going to be rather higher weightclass than her. Definitely higher than her-without-more-effective-permission.)

(Honestly she's somewhat hoping they hurry up and hit her with a stun dart or whatever they have. Not that she enjoys being arrested by foreign governments, but if they are abroad it's pretty inevitable at this point, and they're not going to gain anything by stretching it out.

She does not, of course, have particularly anything she can do about this.)

The woman from before tries opening her door. If they don't stop her she'll just quickly walk to the front door like it's the most reasonable thing in the world for her to go about her business.

"Stop!"

"How many rings do you want to just go away and leave me alone?"

He's not dignifying that with a response.

"Don't move!

Were you aware of what your neighbors were doing?"

(Is the other mage still trying the cold thing? Have they done anything new?)

"Aisan, help me, she's a heat mage!" the woman in the hallway says.

Does Elvira react fast enough to counter a ward preventing any new spells of hers from affecting anything in the hallway?

Still the same language. Yelling for help if there's a not-your-government mage fighting in your hallway is the opposite of a surprising thing to do. She has no idea what adjective for mages the translator just messed up that way, but that's hardly the important thing at the moment.

She has very good reflexes, and magic deployed against her working hers is the kind of thing she's familiar against, even as this manifestation isn't at all. She has to put in effort to keep it from taking effect, but she can keep it from, in fact, taking effect.

From the power level she's guessing that'll be the local Authority of Mages, which means this isn't going to be lasting much longer.

"Be quiet!

If you're not involved you have nothing to be afraid of. This is a very important investigation.

Were you aware of what your neighbors were doing?"

"Tell me what you're investigating and I'll tell you whether I know anything about it."

She glances at the door, considering, but decides to wait for now.

"Illegal magical experimentation and the presence of renegade mages.

Don't worry, we are now aware of the situation and in the process of handling it. Your building should be safe again soon.

That one," he indicates Elvira, "is under my authority and won't do anything to you as long as you're not involved and cooperate."

(Apparently thinking her building has renegade mages running around has made him like this woman better, or something.

Or maybe he's also realized they're probably abroad, even if he hasn't made the connection to the mage possibly being a field mage in that case. (She cannot, of course, attempt to suggest it to him.))

"I'm not involved in any illegal experimentation and I hadn't heard of my neighbors doing any either." She tries to keep a straight face. She only mostly succeeds. "Anyway if you don't want me leaving, do you mind if my man goes out and does our shopping for me?"

"No one leaves! This is an active crime investigation!

And give me your phone."

"I don't have any of those." And if she did she'd have sat at home and used it to get whoever had the other end to call the police.

...And now she's won, she just needs to wait however long it takes. She sits down.

He needs a phone. Maybe there's one in the apartment the renegade mage came out of, but he's not going in there alone...

...the mage out here is unconscious now.

"Go into his apartment and find me a phone," he tells Elvira. "Keep defense on me!"

...that's far away enough that especially without set up ahead of time she's going to be much less effective defense. But not enough that she'll be no defense. 'I can't do that' is something she can say if she has to; arguments about strategy remain not generally that sort of thing.

She goes.

The small apartment has no sign of a phone. There is something, maybe some kind of screen, on the wall showing what looks like probably a human being eaten alive by a... leopard? Jaguar? It's sort of hard to tell what species of big cat it is. But it sure is eating him and he sure is screaming.

There's a bed. The apartment has a loft and things under the loft. It has windows. It has a bathroom that wasn't designed for humans. It has a fridge that is silent and doesn't seem to be plugged in but is working great and full of fruit. The walls and ceiling are decorated with a stylized pattern of overlapping yellow-green leaves.

There are some closed boxes but there aren't any visible electronics at all.