Yep that hurts it a lot more.

Then he can yoink more node-energy and throw more! He's going to be tired after this, but not too exhausted to fight or Gate out if something else happens. 

After about twenty seconds of this it'll be dead.

"The throne room of the fiend pharaoh," Mahdi says, looking around. "Guess we should've seen that coming."

"You okay, Van -"

"Not hurt. Er, need a minute - catch my breath..." He sits down on the floor. 

He heads over to pry gemstones off the throne with a knife - "unless you think it's worth more intact -"

"We're gonna saturate the market for historical artifacts from the time of the Pharaohs of Ascension," Mahdi says bluntly. "And we're in a hurry."

"That's what I figured." Good gemstones, come here.

Vanyel finds that a little upsetting, but he’s not sure it’s for a good reason - this is their history, after all, not his.

“Are, er, we going to get in trouble or draw attention to ourselves for selling all this?” he asks quietly.  

"I will file some paperwork in Sothis certifying that we followed salvage laws and didn't kill anyone except in self-defense and are accurately reporting how much we found and then we can either pay taxes or - more popular - promise to use our abilities and resources in Osirion's defense should she be invaded. This is unusually good luck, finding the palace, but not remarkably so, no one'll think anything of it except that they should've thought of it themselves."

Nod. "And are other adventurers going to show up and try to fight us for it? I'm a bit surprised no one found it sooner, actually, given that you can turn into an earth elemental." 

"You can turn into an earth elemental and determine there are tunnels to Dimension Door down into and then move a ton of sand to find the palace, which is definitely shielded against going right in as an earth elemental or Teleporting in directly - was definitely shielded, other people are going to be able to get in now. We should get out everything we want to keep before we advertise that that's no longer true but I'm not surprised it kept. There are - a lot of places like this, in Osirion. Nearly eight thousand years of history."

"I wonder if we can move the crystal ball, that would be really nice to have consistent access to."

"It would. I don't think we can, though, not without breaking it and definitely not without breaking all the nifty stuff that makes it better than a normal crystal ball you could order made in the city. We could maybe hide it very thoroughly and then use it by Teleporting in whenever we want."

"What's the nifty stuff -"

"True seeing, detect thoughts,  and a much higher effective caster level than normal. Also some optimizations to ...I think lower the failure chance across planes? But I'd have to look at it more, I didn't recognize them."

"Crystal balls do scrying," he explains for Vanyel's benefit. "WIthout that hour-long work time which makes it Mahdi's least favorite spell."

He had been thinking over ways of shielding and illusioning the crystal ball, that locals might not be able to counter, but at the last part he freezes. "...So you could try scrying for - him - again...?" 

"Better than that, you could, anyone can use a crystal ball and you'll have less failure chance because you know him better."

"Oh." 

For some reason it takes a lot of effort to move, and it's not just because he's tired from throwing a lot of node-energy at the devil. He makes his way to the crystal ball. Very slowly. 

"Er, how do I use it?" 

"You want to think about the scrying spell - the ball should guide you through it, just look into it and then kind of follow the thing it's doing - and then focus on uniquely identifying characteristics of the person you're looking for."

Vanyel nods, takes a deep breath, and looks into the ball, with both his ordinary eyes and mage-sight; what is it doing? 

It has the spell-structure that Mahdi spent an hour building, the other day, enormously complex, and it wants to - tug him along it, sort of, which comes with an accompanying dizzing sensation of pulling away from the world to some vantage point from which it's a placid blue disk hanging in darkness.

He follows it. 

Whenever the next step it's tugging him to is 'aim the spell', he - focuses on Tylendel. It's not hard to concentrate on his identifying characteristics. They're etched into his bones. 

It is hard to do it without crying.