"Yes, madam dean, one such as her has been seen," the imp says.

Weiss has not made herself popular among the little devils. Now, how can it pit the two kitsune against each other? Sinnah shows no Good alignment, but she followed Weiss here...

"She has been rising in the service of the queen by using her illusions on the populace and working with the queen's enforcers to kill or capture her enemies."

"...Can't be her, surely. Working for a temporal authority like that. Well, rumors are rumors, maybe something got mangled."

She steps back and gets into a particular pose and starts doing gestures - a lot of gestures, magic faintly firming up into place almost as if building a scaffold.

Nella quickly casts a Detect Magic to get a better look at the process. 

It looks sort of like divination. Done in a really weird, possibly overly complicated way. The thing she's sketching in the air is sort of like preparing spells except for all the way's it's not.

"Just a divination," she says distractedly, finishing up the inner circle and casting it. It hangs there- Not stabilized, more like an ongoing spell with a duration, now.

Now for the second one, that will feed parameters to the inner circle, directions and distances and the signature to identify in a binary search pattern. This one is even weirder, a long series of nested shapes sprouting like wings. (It's actually somewhat challenging to do all this freehand. She gives herself about a 10% chance of bungling it.)

She watches, fascinated and hiding the depths of how mystified she is by the magic being worked. 

She doesn't have a good enough golem face for Messida not to notice, and she starts spectating too.

"Oh, that's something special. You'll want to look up Collaborative Thaumaturgy, Cailean, it appears to me that Sinnah here has a way to make that sort of modular metamagic work for her own spells instead of needing an assistant to provide it during the casting."

Five rounds of casting total.

And then it pulses rapidly, ten, twenty times. Each time cuts off sections of the central shape until it's a tiny sliver. Something else dissolves and- More pulses. Slower, just ten this time.

"-definitely in the city, between four hundred and four thirty or so meters in a five degree arc. I'm gonna go say hi, be back later."

Simnah's fly (3rd)

Nella watches her go, then looks around for the summomed fox. 

"Want to go bite some fiends?" She asks it.

The ghost fox was low-key trying to slip away to go commit Mischief, but turns around at this question! Why yes, it would!

Right now Weiss is walking towards the Guard headquarters to ask after that harrow deck.

It's extremely obvious when Sinnah comes flying overhead. She's recognizable.

Why only now, and not back when she first arrived? The Rift closed right behind her, she checked.

Does it matter?

"Sinnah! Over here!"

Oh there she is.

Sinnah goes down to land, suicide-burn style moving really quite fast until she settles perfectly still on the cobbles.

"Hey, Weiss. Tamamo sent me, and good thing too. Lots of interesting stuff around here."

"Oh, yeah, it's cool. I should try to go through rifts more often, it's fun! And by the way-"

She digs a hand into her tail-fur and withdraws the +2 cloak with a flourish. "Present for ya!"

Her eyes snap to the magic item and she starts running her hands over it, trying to see the underlying structure.

"Don't tell me what it does, I want to figure it out on my own."

"Sure! Uh, apparently the ruby rods from the General's guard constructs' light weapons are really absurdly valuable, and so is the metal they were made of. So I got kind of rich and then immediately bought a ton of magic stuff. Oh, diamonds are even more expensive here. They have all sorts of - weirdness, and it's different weirdness-"

"Right? Right? I'm already seeing some of it, learning the local magic. Prestidigitation."

Weiss's pastry snack now has an additional flavoring of raspberries.

"It's passive," she says of the cloak. "Tirran wizardry can't do passive in almost any circumstance, not without diamonds and even then... It's got a different character."

She makes a complicated face at the Prestidigitation, remembering how she can't learn academic magic... Or can she? Is the local stuff different than Tirran?

......A thought for later.

"Oh hey, can you recharge my wands? I had to burn a few golden chains flies. This place is kinda screwed up. The Inquisition would have a fit."

"Sure, sure, I'm good on energy for now." She doesn't elaborate. Weiss is a friend, and she doesn't like talking about sex. She makes grabby motions with one hand.

She hands over her wands.

"Also- I figured out something really neat."

...Actually, she'll wait to reveal it. Sinnah barely ever does friends, obsessed and kind of annoying sometimes and... Complicated feelings. But Weiss doesn't want to be a shape that is desperately seeking Sinnah's approval quite so much.

"Hm? Neat?"

"-Tell you later."

"Sure. I think this is doing something defensive. It's structured like armor, layering and deflecting. It's also - it won't hold up unless someone's wearing it. Am I on the right track?"

"You're on the right track."

"Oh, be on guard for like - mind affecting stuff. Like charm. A few of the baddies around here have stuff like that."