Jojo seems almost to be holding his breath until they're out of earshot of the avariel. "That was... disturbing."

"Deekin got Break Enchantment, but kind of worried about what kind of spell hits entire town of flying elves. Maybe not easy to dispel."

"I wanted to keep picking at it but not if it's going to zap them when I'm too good at it, ugh."

Deekin nods fervently. "And if it got failsafes like that, maybe failsafes for disenchanting too. General badness, Deekin thinking."

"So much general badness! Who is even served by parking a bunch of avariel down here and then brainwashing them about it?"

"Somebody who likes - abusing their power to remind themselves they still have it?" Garrus guesses.

"It's such a random abuse of power! If you can do this why would you do this in particular instead of just turning the avariel colony into your sex slaves and private theater troupe?"

"...okay, yeah, I'm not sure what flavor of bastard would specifically prefer fucking with people in this particular way instead of one that actually benefits him. Maybe a very dedicated servant of chaos."

"Or it wasn't intentional somehow? Someone was aiming at something else, and got this."

"Maybe. It seems so specific - but magic is weird." Garrus shivers.

After some trekking, they reach the cave.

Does the cave look magic, trapped, guarded, etc.?

There's no traps, but one of the rocks is carved with jagged writing.

"Rock says 'go away'," Deekin notes. "In surface elf language."

"I don't feel especially deterred, though I don't know the queen's likely to know anything herself, she might be as much a victim as the rest, so it could be a quick visit..."

Jojo nods. "Just in case, though, let's infringe on her privacy."

He leads the way into the cave.

Inside, a tall and regal winged elf in a golden robe sits on a large rock, her legs splayed, glowering at nothing in particular. When the party enters, she switches to glowering at them in particular.

"Visitors. Great."

"Yes, hello. Uh, welcome to the Underdark, my understanding is you're new here?"

"One way of putting it," she grunts. "You the welcoming committee? Drow I was expecting, rats and reptiles less so. Did they get cursed too?"

"...yes, actually," Jojo says. "But not, uh, proximally."

She snorts. "What're you here for, then?"

"Curious about the curse, actually."

"Yeah, point and fucking laugh. Come one, come all, look at the moron who fucked with Halaster because she thought having a cool magic toy made her a big shot." She spits on the ground. "Fucking wizards."

"Mm, Halaster slapped us all with a geas and not in a fun way."

The queen laughs, bitterly astonished. "Shit, what are the fucking odds? I - well, maybe I should back up. I was queen, right? Fucking... policy decisions and all that. But I had what you might call a secret weapon. The Mirror of All-Seeing. Artifact, pretty powerful but it wasn't a Mythallar or anything. It let me scry on people for free, punched through all kinds of defenses, let me do some neat shit through the scry too if I had my court wizard Petyr around to cast it for me. I used it to keep my city safe. But... power makes you dumb. Couple of weeks ago I thought, hey, this thing's pretty great, what if I spied on Halaster? Just to make sure he's not planning anything fucked-up. So I tell the damned thing, 'scry on Halaster Blackcloak'." She inhales deeply. "Bad idea. Turns out, he's doing just fine. Sitting at a desk, writing something. He twitches - turns, looks me dead in the eyes with this crazy grin. Then the mirror just - shatters. Into five pieces. I think that's what fucked with our heads, was the mirror breaking. Might've been what brought us down here too. Anyway, I suddenly couldn't stand to be in my throne room. It was - awful. I had to get away. So I ran to this fucking cave, and then - it was just a fucking parade of morons who wanted me to make decisions for them, like just because I was Queen I knew shit - I got them to fuck off by yelling long enough, but obviously that didn't work great, because here you fucking are."

"How... did the mirror shattering... conceivably do all this?"