And he pulls on the rope that will cause the net to capture the remaining goblins and steps out of hiding, a self-satisfied smirk on his face.

"Oh no whatever could have happened here."

He gets...most of them. Some are outside the coverage area, and some of the really small ones slip through.

Mostly they're just cursing at him and occasionally scrambling against each other trying to get out. That part's messy.

"It looks like I won, I think," he says casually, never minding the escapees. "Or does anyone else want to try their luck?"

He pulls some more on the rope, causing most of the goblins to get even more tangled up as they try to get out.

Also pressing them together. Some of the ones in the lower layers aren't happy about it.

One of the escapees yells from behind him, in a surprisingly audible voice, "Hey Shitcrumb! Easy—"

Honestly. He's had two whole days to set this up. He did not buy just the one net. He did not limit his plans to "capture half the goblins, hope the others run, ???, profit." He may, arguably, be pretty daft, but not that daft.

The glasses he's currently wearing aren't his enchanted glasses.

There's rope everywhere.

He kicks the tree to his right, causing a rock to drop. Said rock is heavy enough to pull several lengths of rope all around, near the ground, and when they go taut there's barely enough free space for a small child to walk without tripping or getting their feet tangled up.

Satisfied with his network (heh), he lets go of that first rope and pulls another one, which is connected to a net that was hanging from the trees in the direction he predicted most of the goblins would run towards—directly away from him at a spot where the first net couldn't reach.

"I'm just getting started," he says in a bored tone, looking over his shoulder.

That much rope would impede him more than them. If they were in much of a position to do anything much about it.

At this point they're pretty much all trapped for now. Goblins are stronger than they look and occasionally cleverer. Some of them are having some success pulling it apart; the pests the nets were designed for rarely try that.

But the goblin behind him has been thoroughly snarled and doesn't answer back. Most of the ones he didn't get the first time did go the obvious way. He had enough of an information advantage that it'd almost be surprising if anything didn't go off without a hitch.

"I think we're done here," he drawls. "Oh, and by the way, the hooks keeping these nets and ropes together? All metal. Someone worked pretty hard on them, I believe. Quite refined work. Good luck disentangling them."

And so he carefully starts walking away from this little goblin-nightmare, using both his enhanced dexterity and practice.

This is much less bad than most of them expected. The nightmare of goblins is collectively happy to see him go, and resumes trying to widen the gaps.

He returns to Johannes' demesne, confident they'll take a long while to get sufficiently free to run away, whistling a merry tune.

"You look happy. The plan worked?"

"Yep! And I thought of trying to coerce the oath out of them but honestly there were enough of them there that before I got anywhere with that some would get free and give me trouble. And I definitely wouldn't be able to run very fast in the mess of traps I made there."

"Goblins wouldn't have had the most secondary effects anyway.

So that's case closed, you win? Even if the Behaims try something with the time-traveling Other it won't directly be your problem."

"Yeah, that's it, so all that's left is getting my stuff, leaving the letter, and going to Toronto."

"Do you want help with any of that? I could teleport you in while your father's not looking so you don't have to deal with him..."

"I can just show up when he's at work and my stepmother's busy and my half-siblings are in school," she shrugs. "But thank you for the offer."

"Of course.

Well, good luck in Toronto, and you're always welcome back here."

"I'll text you when I get there."

And off she goes. She gets all her stuff and leaves the note, and uses subtle glamour to escape her stepmother's notice. Before getting on a bus, however, she goes to visit Rose again.

She lets her in. "Hello again. You're on your way out?"

"I am, yeah. Discharged my oath earlier today, it was really quite awesome, but now I'm ready to scramble."

"Congratulations. Do try not to get in the same position again, but I'm glad you managed to escape."

"I'll try. Say, before I leave, I was wondering if you had any idea whether vestiges and ghosts are people."

"How much do you know about them? I could start with a description of what they are or skip to the philosophical, whichever is useful."

"The description might be most useful, I perhaps have a definition of 'person' different than that of other practitioners."

"Ghosts are impressions of an event the world thinks is memorable. Most often, this is a violent death. A car crash, for instance, might leave a ghost shaped like the experience of dying of blood loss. It will reach to its environment with a short script, replaying whatever it thought or said at the moment that its current environment is most similar to. You can get it to change its actions by reminding it of a different point in the script if you know the chain of events.

A vestige is similar in some ways, but with a much larger corpus to draw from. At the extreme, you can think of a ghost that acts based on the original's entire life. They are also artificially created, while very few practitioners manufacture ghosts. They are more capable of change or complexity and can be more corporeal, but they degrade faster. It takes constant input to maintain them on the scale of months, and eventually they fall apart regardless."

"...oh."

"Do ghosts retain memories of previous iterations of their loops?"