No! No blood magic! She is not keen on having to cut herself to cast spells!

"Um, I would like to also learn what you know about the constellations, regardless. I think it's best for us to stick together. If it would not trouble you to lend us a big tent, it would be preferable. We can pitch it ourselves.

One of my worries is that we might be...too far away for our deity to be able to grant us spells. In that case, learning this world's magic might be our only option. Though if not, we would be open to compensating you for your trouble by casting cleric spells for you in lieu of paying in gold." She lists several cleric spells she thinks would be useful for her, and their respective spell levels:

Mending (0th), Purify Food and Drink (0th), Create Water (0th) are all useful, Enhance Water (1st) turns water into wine, Tears to Wine (2nd) creates wine that enhances your mental abilities.

She thinks that Allegra might find more use with her healing spells, though. Diagnose Disease (1st), Remove Blindness/Deafness (3rd), Remove Curse (3rd), although she's unsure how that would interact with this world's curses, Remove Disease (3rd), and of course, Cure Light/Moderate/Serious Wounds (1st, 2nd, 3rd).

"I would be willing to cast one spell of third level for you per day, or two spells of second-circle or below. I can cast spells of zeroth level as much as I want, although I can only prepare four separate spells of that level. If you are looking for a specific effect, ask me and I'll tell you whether that's something I would be able to request. I would need to reserve most of my spell slots for my own purposes," and by that, she means possible combat. 

"Blood magic isn't so much 'easier' as - more likely to work for you if you're more into making intuitive connections than memorising lots of facts?

Constellations are probably easier to teach if you can pick them up at all, I can just hand you a pamphlet and go find Cory to set up the Striding tent he's got in storage while you're reading.

Our medicine is pretty good - generally if someone's not dead on their feet we can sort them out, unless the injury has got so attached they now heal in that shape - I suspect you'd have some takers for experimental tests of your healing on those cases in Seren, or it sounds very useful on the front lines somewhere, but not so much out here.

Tears to Wine... We don't have anything that directly enhances, like, thinking, unless you count some very powerful enchantments that are very specific to thinking about certain things, like trading or leading an army. I'd love to see how that works, or anything in that area?"

Yes! Constellations, please!

"We would love to learn about constellations, yes. As for us, we have spells that directly enhance Intelligence and Wisdom. I can try to prepare them tomorrow for you, if you'd like. Tears to Wine grows stronger as the caster grows stronger, and I am frankly not a very strong caster. I can try preparing Owl's Wisdom or Fox's Cunning for you tomorrow, and then cast them on you so you can know what it's like. Both of them will only last for five minutes each, but sometimes, five minutes is all you need.

We do also have spells that enhance a specific thing, such as spells that make it easier to talk to people, or spells that make it easier for you to make something."

"How long does the wine last after casting, and how long does its effect last? If the wine keeps, you might have a good trade commodity there even if it isn't very powerful, there's a huge market for novel potions and similar.

I'd quite like to try the talky one at some point too, that sounds extremely useful for me; these days I get most things done by talking to people. We've got one ritual for making things but it's quite specific, lets you make something you already can overnight rather than it taking a month or two; I suppose there's also the one that steals crafting knowledge from someone else's mind..."

"Sadly, it doesn't keep for very long. By 'it', I mean the magic, not the wine itself. The magic will only last for an hour or so, after which the wine becomes inert. The same goes for the spells that enhance diplomacy or Charisma. There exist magic items which give a permanent enhancement to those so long as you are wearing them, but neither of us are trained in magic item crafting. I think an advantage of your world's magic is that many of your spells are permanent or last a very long time. For us, most magic is temporary on the order of minutes or days, depending on the specific spell, and making a spell permanent costs thousands of gold coins' worth of supplies."

Wow, the wizards at the base would love her if she managed to bring back either of these spells, er, rituals. Imagine being able to kidnap a wizard from Absalom and steal all the crafting knowledge from their mind...there's probably some catch to the spell that she's not seeing. Maybe it's really expensive?

"Could you tell me more about the crafting rituals? My organization makes most of its money crafting magic items of all sorts, such as the magic items that enhance diplomacy and Charisma that I talked about."

"Ah. Many of our spells are pretty much instantaneous, but those that create objects, or rituals, often last a season or even a year; we also find it expensive to make things other than potions actually permanent, mostly it's done as a vanity project rather than as a matter of course.

Timeless Hammer Rhythm is an Autumn ritual, an artisan who can usually make a magic item in a month or two months can make it overnight instead; it takes all the materials as usual, and the mana is expensive, but it's very convenient if you need something right now. The steal-artisan-knowledge one - I can't remember the name, it's not as commonly used - is Night, and the knowledge rests on you as an enchantment - I think you can only hold one item at a time, as well. I'm not sure I've ever heard of it being used, but it's not the kind of thing you really want to advertise, so I'm not sure I'd have heard even if it was.

In theory you could make it permanent with ilium, same as everything else, so if you really wanted to preserve knowledge of a particular item we no longer have the schema for, it would be handy for that. But mostly it's for 'keep your enemy artisan who doesn't want to make things for you in your dungeon and make the things he knows anyway', which is all kinds of illegal, not that I expect that stops everyone."

Wow. They need to learn both those spells...er, rituals for the church. It would be amazing for them.

Felicia yawns, and it takes her a second before she can stop herself and return to a neutral expression.

"I'm very sorry for that. It has been a long day. Would you mind if we sleep now? We will be able to prepare the mind-enhancing spells for you tomorrow, as well as decide what we want to do. My apologies."

"Oh, no problem. Do you mind waiting here while I try to find Cory and borrow his tent? Would you rather set it up yourselves or have him do it?"

"Fortunately, our own belongings came with us. We actually brought our own tent." It's kind of stupid to bring a tent to the Abyss, but whatever, she wouldn't have been the one carrying it anyway. Hah.

"Would it be fine for us to set it up just outside?"

"Oh, in that case I'll just show you to the clearing where you won't be in the way."

Allegra heads towards the door, expecting them to follow.

They follow and start setting up the tent, which is just big enough for the two of them. While they did bring wandermeal along to eat, they only brought a few days' worth. It's probably best to ask for food rather than eat their non-perishable rations.

"Would you mind terribly if we ate with you?" she asks.

"Not at all; what kind of things do you like to eat? I can certainly arrange some bowls of venison stew, there's likely bread and dried fruit and someone might be doing potatoes, I can probably round up some beans and mushrooms if you'd prefer."

No stew! She is so tired of stew. She happily accepts the offer for potatoes, bread, and fruit. Elias nods wordlessly, and resumes laying out the sleeping bags and putting their items off to the side of the tent.

"I can see if someone's got a fresh roast on, if it's stew rather than the venison that's the problem. Is it okay if I get some other people to bring it round? I'll pick people I trust not to get jumpy about things, but it'll make everyone feel better if a few more people have got to interact with the Mysterious Strangers and not been turned into a frog or anything."

"Thank you so much. We usually always have stew where I'm from – it's easy to make for a large amount of people – and you get tired of it after a while. And yes, that's fine with me." She'd rather have slept early, but she's not going to refuse the requests of this Important Person that's feeding her and helping her.

She chuckles a little at the last sentence.

"If it makes you feel any better, clerics such as myself do not get access to Baleful Polymorph. That's the spell you would need to turn someone into a frog."

Elias listens, but doesn't respond, instead choosing to take off his plate armor and lay it out neatly beside his mat.

"Very well then, I'll see what I can do."

Allegra heads back into the Steading.

A little later, three new people show up bearing two heaped plates of roast venison, potatoes, dense nutty bread, raisins and dried apricots, and the third with a warm jug of spiced apple juice. All three have obvious bark patches and visible green veins.

"Evening," calls the older woman, "hope these are to your liking, let us know if you wanted something else. I'm Carwyn, this is Bron and Tyfa," she says, indicating the man with the other plate and the younger woman with the jug.

Wow, this is a lot of food! And of very good quality, too. The spiced apple juice smells amazing. She had expected them to just bring leftovers or something. The delight is plainly visible on her face.

"Thank you so much, Carwyn, and Bron and Tyfa as well." She nods to all three of them in turn. "No, I think this will be plenty."

She passes one of the plates to Elias, who's sitting at the back of the tent. Felicia is sitting at the front, with her legs outside of the tent and on the grass. She'd rather not subject the others to Elias's Aura of Fear. She had not expected it to be so inconvenient, honestly. Elias usually has very good control of it, and the aura normally doesn't affect people who are neutral to them. It has to be something about this world that's affecting it, she thinks.

She wants to say something about the bark patches and green veins, but she's not sure whether it would be impolite. Some people are touchy about that, especially tieflings.

"I noticed that many people here are like you," she says. "Er, 'briars', I mean. Allegra told me about them."

Elias is happy to sit in the back and eat. He doesn't ignore the conversation though – he's clearly listening intently – but he says nothing. 

Now that he has his armor off, his skin and hair are easier to see. Although his hair resembles bronze thread, his skin is marble-white with grey-black veins and patterns on it one would expect of the stone. His body is unusually muscular too.

He does take an interest in seeing the briars however, now that he can see them from closer.

"Yes, we're mostly briars here. Is your friend here a cambion, by any chance? And you'd be a changeling?" replies Carwyn, conversationally. Bron looks like he's a little touchy on the subject, but is reserving judgement to see what she has to say about 'briars'. Tyfa is busy looking curiously at their equipment, while ineptly trying not to look like she is.

The bark seems to follow the kind of lines you might expect someone to have as scars; Carwyn's are mostly on the forearms and hands like you might expect from someone who does a lot of outdoor or kitchen work, Tyfa has a big patch on her right brow like she was punched hard or fell over onto something, Bron mostly has small patches like someone who's been working at a forge might have burns. The veins are most obvious at Carwyn's temples and the back of Bron's hands. Also, all of them seem somewhat unusually fidgety, like they find keeping still very difficult.

She runs a hand through her hair.

"I've never seen a briar before, so it's really interesting to see. I'm very fond of plants and flowers and one of my jobs is tending to plants in greenhouses and herbariums. As for us..." should she say they're from another world? Well, they did come through the portal, so...

"I don't know what a cambion is. I don't know that I'm a changeling. Maybe? Back where I'm from, they'd call me a 'half-elf' and him an 'aasimar'." She'd rather not lie unless she has to, that's just best practice. It's clear to her that the people here are led by Allegra, or something of the sort, so although she only needs Allegra's help, it wouldn't be good to antagonize the people under her or the ones she's taking care of. She hopes that's enough of an answer.

Their fidgetiness is making him want to fidget too, but he thinks that's just his natural paranoia and on-edge-ness speaking. He busies himself by focusing on eating. The bacon and apple juice is great. 

"Yeah, I've heard the summer heralds that come through from the big army ritual get called 'elven knights', so half-elf makes sense," replies Carwyn, nodding. "We're not really very plant-y, plants tend to stay put and not do much, but that's what the Spring realm likes to look like. I guess we should be thankful it's not fungus."

"I've never heard the word - ah-sim-ar? - before," contributes Bron. "Sorry if we're being nosy, but is that Winter or Autumn? Or none of our business, of course."

"Yes, fungus isn't my thing either. My—" she was about to talk about Damian's connection to plants, except maybe this isn't a good time to reveal that she's a cleric. Would she be considered a herald here, given that she can cast spells given to her by Damian? Yes, any clerics can cast any cleric spell, but domain spells are restricted on what domains your god has to offer.

"Er, sorry. I don't know whether it's Winter or Autumn, actually. Maybe both?" Should she divulge her ignorance? Yes, she probably should.

"So, I actually have no idea what you mean by Winter or Autumn. Allegra mentioned that he might be touched by Autumn, but I don't know what that entails." She's not going to mention the many Winter enchantments on him.

"Oh, you might have different names for the Realms, yes! Uh, Spring is - growth, liveliness, also rot, decay, the cycle of life? Summer is - glory, anger that passes quickly, strength in a kind of sudden, showy way? Autumn is trade, roads, cities, luck, wealth - and greed, and politics, and stubbornness? Winter is - uh, death, endurance, kind of just hanging on in there however bad it gets? Day is pure thought, logic, knowing things - but, like, facts things - and Night is emotion, intuition, hiding things... luxury for its own sake, naga are very into nice things.

Metallic hair is normally an Autumn thing, metallics in general are Autumn-y, but pale and, like, greyish veins is normally more a Winter thing. I've never heard of someone being both at once, they normally, like, fight each other off?" replies Carwyn.