She feels a sick feeling of dread - about identity replacement and ego death -

Gods.

...

...

Are the restrictions looser now? That... Doesn't make sense. But she'll take it.

She- tries to avoid thinking about it, because - the orders might have a general 'don't escape' - yes, she needs to cast a spell. For no particular reason. This spell needs to happen, disconnected from any later plans.

She can cast a spell from a scroll. So she pulls it out, and opens it, and starts pulling her will, trying to focus on the practiced execution of this task.

-The scroll of Mind Purge fires off. It cost her around the equivalent of 400 gp (not that she thinks of it in gp) but it's so fucking worth it as an oh shit option. Mind magics are the worst. (She says, knowing she often uses illusions against people)

Weiss can feel a mental hitch of the edge of some command as she rationalizes using the scroll but overall she is able to cast it without problems. It seems to have worked?  At least, she can't feel any more mental orders for the moment.  No one comes bursting into the room, it seems she is still alone, at least for the moment.

Okay, plan time.

So.

It might be possible to just go into the Woods and go home. But... There's no reason to suspect this - whatever she is - won't just try again. She could go hang out with Sinnah, who will be delighted at the prospect of conflict with an unknown magical powerhouse (for the things she could learn), or lean on a major temple to the Light Gods (but then she's endangering them for her own protection), or the Inquisition (ugh) or actual Nobles (ugh ugh)-

-But any information she can gather on the situation will surely help. Especially since she feels so... Sick, and evidently step 1 of the ego replacement thing is already gone. (Aaaaaaaaaaa. But she can't do anything about it from here.)

Even if poking around might be dangerous- Well. Who dares wins?

First, she activates her magic sight and has a good look around.

The room has a lot of miscellaneous junk, all the accoutrements of a child's life crammed together.  Among them: a baby's crib, drawings and notes on a table, a few toys, a thick book.  But the only active magic in the room is something coming from a chest and that chest itself (which is invisible to mundane sight but shows up plainly to her magic sight).

...Grieving mother? With enough power to do something about it.

...Scary.

She will loot the gloves on general principle, reflecting on how weird it is to see invisible things by the invisibility magic.

...Leave a note to throw her off? Hmm. HMMMMM.

Weiss extends a faint tendril of illusion energy past any doors, if one is present, using it to reflect the scene outside in a fish-eye lens sort of way and look around.

The gloves are some kind of luck effect!  They can help her attack more accurately and reliably, and they have some sort of general protective effect that helps along several different lines: evading hostile area effects, mentally resisting them, and physically enduring them.

The door out of the room leads to a long (seemingly) empty hallway.  Magical lights glow in distantly placed sconces.  There are doors to other rooms or hallways but they are closed.

Oh, she's not putting them on. And she can't tell much more than rough magical strength, herself. Which is why she's not putting them on. They can sit in her Tail of Holding. The used scroll too. Deny the enemy information. 

...She doesn't reckon exploring is a winning move. Okay, time to-

-Shift, and in the same motion, leap to the dream world, the Woods Between.

The terrain here naturally forms a sort of reflection of the terrain in normal reality, if shifted into a spatially inconsistent dream-like idyllic wild vale by her own influence. It's a great way to cover ground and get out of places.

(It can also take her home, no matter the start, but that's a once a month thing, or thereabouts, and she used it two weeks ago.)

Her ability works as expected, but there is something Wrong with the Woods Between here.  There is rot deep within the trees.  It is exposed in places where trunks are broken or knots have decayed, and looking closer Weiss can see the rot section opening to a vast void deep below in the earth.  The ground is treacherous, with seemingly minor ruts and trenches opening to crevasses and caves quite unlike the normal Woods Between, if she fell through she might end up outside the Woods entirely.  And the Woods Between seem to be in a bit of a valley here, with imposing mountains off in the distance enclosing and isolating the rotten trees and foul caverns, they might impose some obstacle to trying to get back to a more normal part of the Woods.

Hey. Hey. You need to be veeeeeery sneeeeeeaky and do [this] when you go back into the real.

Holy shit, the Woods are fucked up here. That's concerning, is she trapped between dimensions or something? And WOAH Tamamo is talking to her unprompted. She needs to do - a weird abstract illusion that... Renames terrain features?

Maybe Tamamo is trying to help and is having trouble, given the fuckedupness. Hopefully.

Tamamo, can you tell me why? What's going on?

Information is so fucking expensive she haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaates it this place sucks. But spending so much of her leeway elsewhere for ""intervention budget"" beyond a certain amount just ain't worth it. No response.

Of course not.

...Towards the mountains, perhaps, as far as the Woods will take her. It generates a circle a few miles around each time she enters them. She'll move carefully and have her wand of Sinnah's Fly out to arrest any falls.

She's gonna need to move. Put lots of dirt between her and the wizard-witch-person who wants to ego-death her. It's lucky she finds intense running kind of theraputic, she guesses.

She picks a direction - towards the closest seeming mountains, why not - and gets going.

The terrain continues to be treacherous and difficult to navigate.  Some areas are a bit worse (the land is entirely bare in one area, with the chasm blatantly visible), a few spot are almost normal (although the trees still seem a bit sickly), just with a bit of unevenness to the ground.  If she can judge the distance accurately and there aren't any complications, it might be a day or two of travel to reach the mountains. 

She reaches the edge of the Woods Between, and drops back down into reality soon enough. The terrain is even worse here. Cursed lands, and cold. She has some resistance to cold, at least. And also foxfire.

And she remembers Tamamo's warning, and spins up that weird abstract illusion that renames places around her misleadingly, in a really weird and meta way. Probably it's supposed to throw off tracking magic? It's neat and mind bending to think about. This illusion will be somewhat expensive, energy-wise, to keep up for the long term. (And there's another pang of anxious worry). If she's being tracked in one way, there might be others. She spins up... Every obfuscating trick she can recall. She remains invisible. The reactive blackness-sphere that works on magical remote viewing. She insulates her paws from the terrain, running on air, so as not to leave tracks. She scrubs her scent and the disturbance of air in her passage. She makes sure she's not losing any fur, and does not radiate infrared or occlude sound or have a detectable 'life force' (what a pain that one monster was).

Regardless. Pick a direction and try to keep going in it. The terrain will change eventually.

Areelu awakens deeply refreshed (she slept a bit more than she strictly requires given her ring of sustenance).  She feels a deep sense of hope she hasn't felt in some time.  All will be made right with the world, one way or another, she will make it happen.

She hasn't prepared spells yet, but she should still have plenty of time with how long that potion should last, so she'll take the time for using one her previously prepared Greater Scryings...

Areelu did not use the technique to ensure her scrying sensor ended up covered by the mindblank she herself is still under, so if Weiss is alert and has the right detections active, she can observe a tiny magical sensor appear above her and float over her head!

The scrying sensor sees perfect blackness. She notices it pinging off her illusion specifically meant to intercept remote magical viewing. Not much she should do about it except keep running, though.

That doesn't look like the room, but maybe the subject is still in it...  Areelu loosened the dominate orders a lot to let the subject stretch her magic a bit, so maybe an illusion to cover the sensor?  Areelu's overland flight is still active, so she takes off flying towards the room.  She casts a true seeing from a scroll along the way, she shouldn't let a false alarm about an escape attempt lead to screwing up in a way that allows an actual escape.  She tries to issues orders over her dominate but it seems like the dominate is gone, one way or another.  Her heart is sinking further and further as she flies, by the time she gets to the room she isn't surprised to the subect isn't there.  She checks for her own scrying sensor with detect magic, just in case, and doesn't see it. 

…Also, leaving her scrying sensor up is a mistake if it is not returning useful information.  She dismisses it.  Hopefully (but Areelu is really past wasting effort on hope), the subject didn't see it, not that it matters as the subject apparently already decided to counter scrying.  Sensible, the subject would have made good raw material for recreating her daughter.

How did this happen?  No, no time to waste thinking about that, she needs to fix this.  She starts casting a Discern Location.  It will take ten minutes...

Oh, the remote view dropped.

She keeps running.

...She's already down to, it's hard to put numbers on it but she's got a gutfeel for it after a while, around 900/1000 energy. A big chunk of that was entering the Woods Between, and she probably wasn't quite at full, but she notes the feeling and tries to repeat to herself to check again later, see just how much the illusions drain and whether it's sustainable off of moon dancing. The other options would-

-Dammit, it would suck, a lot, in a bad way, but maybe better than literally being pod personed. Put it out of mind for now and consider it if it comes to that.

She's got a location.  She casts a few of the most critical buffs (true seeing is a must have for this situation), and attempts a Greater Teleport... and reappears in her original location.  Did the subject... fall through to the Abyss and the Greater Teleport fail for that reason?  The location she got with Discern Location sounded normal and not Abyssal... maybe too normal (the subject should still be in the Worldwound)?  

Her feeling have reached the point of despair and started to harden into grim resolve.  She's overcome the will of Gods, destroyed nations, she is quite possibly just one step away from success at her one true goal.  I promise.  She repeats it like a mantra.  She will find a way.  She goes through her portal into a demiplane just to try Gating from there.  It opens to a location in the Worldwound... that is too far for her subject to have traveled to, so her Discern Location is entirely garbage?  She isn't quite sure.

She's exhausted her previous days spells and her mythic power to dangerously lower margins. And spent quite a few scrolls.  She needs to prepare spells and reorient.  She'll try all the fundamentals again, start trying obscure tricks, whatever it takes.  I promise.  I promise.  I promise.

An hour later Weiss will get another ping from Areelu's scrying.  And another a few hours after that.

Hey.

Hey Iomedae.

I know a thing. A thing you might want to know. I know that I keep to our tiny clique and you've maybe barely heard of us and the fact that I'm talking to you at all narrows down the kinds of things that it might be about, and that I know you know that and am saying it anyway, and the knowing that I know that you know that-

Anyway. I know what Areelu Vorlesh is doing today.

Who is talking to her?  Iomedae pulls up a report on Tirra and puts more of her attention on the conversation.  After a small delay (semi-randomized to minimize side channel leakage of information).  Iomedae replies.

That is potentially very valuable information, such as if it enables a strike team to slay Areelu (even only temporarily), or to steal from her, or destroy her resources, or perhaps some Chaotic other thing that Tamamo has in mind that isn't incompatible with Iomedae's goals or methods?

Iomedae includes an expression of possible payments in the concept of "very valuable" (Iomedae can pay so much directly, and potentially a lot more if drawing from the payment of other Gods opposed to Areelu, and can launder/anonymize Tamamo's involvement this much, given this tradeoff in total payment.)