"Stories after the tragedy are more to the effect of 'I hear that Stephen Grayward killed his family for the insurance money' and 'Stephen Grayward runs a secret brothel and all the kids are the whores' children and not his' and wilder stuff."

Main consistent sign is if a bird lands on you repeatedly it means that you should start moving. At first, they would make some kind of sound, but they figure it's better if the bird didn't. Some birds still will scream at you, though. It's hard to communicate and train concepts more complex than that. Not in this scale.

The birds are not shy, not when Franklyn is around. And may accept petting.

"Wow. That's... vicious. They think he runs a brothel out of his own home? Out in the middle of the woods? I guess a rumour doesn't have to be plausible to be spread..." He'd ask about their mothers but he vaguely recalls Temple mentioning that Stephen had cheated on his wife after the tragedy, so it's probably a sensitive subject. 

He'll be sure to leave the area if a bird ever lands on him/screams at him, then. At the moment, though, he will pet the birds who will let him do so! Soft feathers! Little wings! So cute. He is going to be drawing birds and wings again all evening, he just knows it.

"Yeah, it's mostly people being bored. Anyway, when we swing around town the official story is simply that dad made bad decisions out of grief."

"Alright." 

Their destination is noticeable for being a clearing, or maybe a group of oddly-shaped clearings. There are some ruins, mostly crumbling from the exposure from the elements, but some marks are sure indicative of unnatural claws. They may notice a weird quietness to the woods in this area.

"Land there." Temple indicates a mostly dry bare patch of dirt.

They land. 

Alex looks over at the ruins curiously, "There used to be buildings here?" His voice is hushed, trying not to stand out too much against the quiet atmosphere. 

"Yeah, the family's old home. Though it's mostly dismantled," he points, "that huge rectangular outline of walls over there is actually where they built a warehouse around the house's former ruins."

Temple starts unpacking ritual paraphernalia.

"Was the house destroyed during the... tragedy? Or the warehouse?" 

Can Jamie help with unpacking?

(He can.)

"The house was destroyed, then they built a warehouse around the ruins to contain it. There were stray magic going, and they couldn't leave it exposed."

"Huh. What was the stray magic doing?" 

"Weird temperatures, some points were freezing or burning though I was told that was not particularly common, just noticeable. Several bits of the house were floating midair. That was more dangerous, floating slow moving debris can still hurt you if you try to force your way through. At least one spot caused vivid hallucinations - we have no idea where that came from. Early on there was more chaos, but those are the ones that stuck. It was mostly ward effects that got distorted and corrupted."

"Huh." He really does not know nearly enough about how sorcery works. "It's stopped since? The remainder of the wards... ran out of energy?" 

"Yup. We did help some along the way. But the zone is safe to travel through like we are doing. Except it's inside the monster manifestation zone."

"Hm," he nods. "Do they come on any sort of schedule? The monsters."

"Every few months, averaging to two and a half. Even if you guys don't stay it should let us break to three. Maybe four if you do."

Temple looks slightly uncomfortable. "It's not a linear progression, but not a far off guess. And I think I am done here." He says, with the spell circle complete.

He heads over to the circle. "So staying close to the vault helps, too? And, what do we do, here?" 

Jamie waits for instructions as well, looking over the spell circle curiously. More arcane writing like the book yesterday?

"It does. Just being attuned at all to the vault helps even if you're on another world. I just need you two to stay over there."

A fair bit of arcane writing, a couple of weird metallic objects and a bowl of some kind of herb.

"It would help some if we could live here, I mean, in the immediate area, but not enough that's worth the risk of being this close to where the monsters manifest."