Royal retrieves some chess pieces from a box: a king, queen, and pair of rooks in stainless steel, and a pawn, rook, bishop, knight, and queen in clear glass. She helps Castle set them out in a square-within-a-square configuration.

The glass pawn goes directly in front of Vampire Two, with the knight just past it, and a steel rook beyond that; the glass rook goes to his right, the glass bishop to his left, and the glass queen behind him. The four possible promotion targets thereby form a square with Vampire Two in their center. The outer square of steel pieces is completed by a queen on his right, a king on his left, and a second rook behind him. Royal sits down behind the second rook as soon as she's placed it.

Castle sits in front of Vampire Two, opposite Royal.

"Now I'm going to talk to that glass pawn for a bit. There will be some illusory special effects related to the spell metaphors. Nothing too exciting, probably. It'll show us what you promote to, and it might hint at some other things about your life and history. Sound good?"

"All right then."

Castle addresses the pawn. In a pleasant poetic rhythm, she talks about metaphor and resonance, symbols and associations. The light in the room seems to dim. Castle acquires a sort of faint aura depicting a round stone tower with blocky crenellations, a rook writ large; Royal acquires a faint golden crown on her head and a faint silver sword on her back. Vampire Two is at first unchanged, then acquires a hint of a vague and formless shadow hovering at his edges.

A minute or so passes. Castle continues speaking softly as these images solidify. The ceiling of the room acquires the appearance of a sky and cycles from night to clouded day to night again, starry and moonless. Then she inquires of the pawn what it might like to grow up to be.

The response is slow in coming. Castle waits in silence for several seconds. Then the knight in front of Vampire Two flares. A spark of white light travels from it to the pawn. The spark grows, reaches out, wraps around Vampire Two, and settles into a mantle of light. Something that might be a cloak, but carries a hint of wings. It displaces his shadowy aura almost completely.

Castle thanks the pawn. The images fade.

"Interesting," she says. "A knight metaphor, but not a strong one; I'm pretty sure it was trying to tell me you make a solid pawn too. And your knight metaphor isn't that usual either. Knight-as-cloak? It makes sense, kind of, but I wouldn't have come up with it on my own."

Royal gets up and starts moving pieces around to achieve the described configuration.

"Alliteration is when words start with the same sound as each other."

Castle retrieves some more presumably-relevant items. Small rocks and round glass pebbles. She passes a large smooth river stone to Royal, who places it prominently in the diagram; the miscellaneous objects go in a circle around the outside, enclosing Castle and Royal and all the chess pieces. Then they sit down again.

"Round two," says Castle. "Quiet please."

This time she talks to the river stone.

She describes in somewhat fanciful language how old it must be, how it was formed by geologic processes and made its way through the forces that shaped it into its current form and carried it at last into her possession. The imagery she calls up comes faster this time, and more strongly: the darkness beneath mountains envelops the room, lightening eventually to the gloom at the bottom of a river. Darkness is a definite theme here.

She asks the stone to lend its strength to this working. She describes a cloak of safety wrapping around 'this traveller', shielding him from the harmful light of day. She describes the strength of stone walls, solidity, opacity, permanence; her personal tower-image surrounds the spellcasting area, a translucent but nevertheless firmly solid stone wall. The metaphor gives him, not a cloak, but a pair of sleek black raven's wings.

Outside the image of the stone tower, an illusory dawn breaks, spilling illusory sunlight into the room. It pours in through the walls of Castle's tower, but loses some of its fire along the way; by the time it reaches Vampire Two, it's thin and weak. He sits in a comfortable shadow. Even as the sun rises to illuminate him fully, the walls are there to protect him. His illusory feathers shine, and he is unharmed.

Castle thanks the stone for its help. The metaphorical sun sets; the metaphorical tower fades; Vampire Two's metaphorical wings are the last to go.

Castle smiles.

"Congratulations on your new imperviousness to sunlight," she says. "You can go take a spectator seat now. Tea, your turn."

Tea comes and sits in the middle of all the masking tape.

"I'm reasonably confident that I'm a knight but there might be an intricacy I'm missing," he says.

Castle and Royal get up to rearrange the pieces again, putting away the glass knight and pawn and getting out a fresh set of pawn-rook-bishop-knight-queen to lay out the promotion square. They also clear away the river stone and the outer circle before sitting back down.

Once again - she varies the words slightly, but hardly at all - Castle invites a pawn to discuss its life choices.

All the images are the same at first, down to Tea's vague shadow, but when Castle asks the pawn for its decision it fairly leaps to obey. Sparks rise from the queen, the bishop, and the knight; the queen doesn't offer him more than an indistinct glimmer, but the bishop's light forms an open book floating before him with an arrow engraved on its cover, and the knight's glow becomes a radiant aura depicting him as an armoured figure on a horse.

Castle thanks the pawn for its input. Everything fades.

"Bishop as book, amusingly enough, with a solid hint of arrow," she says. "And a very versatile and open-ended reading of knight. I'd be tempted to summarize it to knight-as-champion, but that's not quite it. You could take queen if you had to but it's pretty firmly a third option, and with such a void of response from the rook in an otherwise lively pawn promotion I tend to conclude you'd be fairly hopeless in that role."