"Yeah, sure." Griffie can poke at something on eir tablet while Jane thinks.

Jane gets something to drink, and sips at it greedily.

"Ugh, I never manage to stay properly hydrated, I swear."

"Feeling better?"

"Yeah, I suppose so.  We were doing something, right?  We should probably eventually get back to that.  ...That's a weird thought to have to think when we were clearly just doing it."

"I was wondering if you'd like to predict what happens after we reseal Rhoswen, or just hear the story. Feel free to ask me for details on stuff we bring back from her realm or such, I'm not going to ask you to predict my actions."

"I don't really think there's much worth predicting other than 'you reseal Rhoswen and maybe the intrusion is "magically" undone'.  There's still Tenzekil and the wedding, but...okay, still out of predictions."

"Okay! So! We bring home Kenchlo who's a pre-sealed-war bard, Rhoswen's powerful shadow-manipulation staff, a bunch of ancient books of forgotten magic and history and such, Tenzekil who regrets helping Rhoswen and not just because she lost, some well-contained biological samples in case their fungus farm happened to have really tasty products or such, some prisoners Rhoswen was keeping polymorphed into songbirds for aeons, and, uh, basically try to cram our carrying capacity and that of our allies with the best allocation of everything valuable that isn't nailed down too thoroughly. The true unifying activity of adventurers everywhere, I'm sure. We get back and the realm-merge effect is becoming undone but isn't all finished so we can't call Heaven or Axis yet. We get the wizard uncursed and such. Any predictions from here, or nah?"

"Nothing really worth bothering to even register; you're in the falling action."

"What actually happened is that we were ambushed by a massive team of daemons who were apparently camping out in this forest the whole time."

"..."

"Your GM is a sadist."

"…do you have a model of how high the value of information of a pre-sealed-war historian and archive is? There are very strong reasons to really, really not want us to have it. And one may be in a good position to ensure that if one, say, engineered this whole foul mess."

"No, I really don't.  We basically don't have anything like that.  That doesn't mean your GM is not a sadist!"

"...So, a bigger bad, huh?"

"It's Charon. It's not like we've been subtle about opposing him, why shouldn't he return the favor? And our claims about the details of this incident are a matter of public record but I'm kind of tempted to rant at this point."

"Please, let loose.  It sounds like you need to."

"Not doing this one in prediction-soliciting form, to be clear."

"Initial wave that shows up is a massive group of death-by-magic and death-by-battle daemons, whom I'm probably just going to generically call 'daemons' from here mostly, they didn't have a specialized role beyond the extent to which 'melee' and 'magic are specialties, and a flock of death-by-daemon supporters, cacodaemons, to hang around and get the souls of casualties because why not. But more are still teleporting in, including Bibliodaemons, death by paperwork, known for modifying memories and records."

"We, uh, hope that their presence means the barrier went down sooner than expected so we can call in reinforcements. I check whether the Holy Book of Infinite Guidance has a connection. It doesn't. We're on our own. …that is, the entire fae camp including us is on our own, it's not the three of us and companions. We get to coordinating defensive efforts, more daemons show up, specifically thanadaemons – I mentioned them earlier, death by senescence – and some other powerful daemons, we continue fighting and coordinating a defense but start getting concerned this may not be winnable, but fae and treants and such in their own forest are however pretty powerful."

"And then an Obcisidaemon shows up, death-by-genocide daemon, could probably defeat us all on its own, but it instead burns Kenchlo to ash in a column of unholy fire, spears the cacodaemon with his soul, and leaves. Which … we have a thing about defending people who defect to us, you know? Brought one back from the Abyss before. But if the soul's destroyed there's nothing we know how to do, and if an Obcisi- is willing to leave the battlefield with a single soul, well … daemons are very skilled at soul destruction. I mean, now I'm thinking if I end up with an absurd amount of scrying maybe I can reassemble his soul from scratch with reference to scry results or something, but at the time he just seemed gone."

"And this is the point where if I knew Kenchlo as a person better I'd tell you about his virtues, but I'm not sure how much serving in an evil queen's court really encourages the development of those, so I'll tell you that he was a better dancer than you or I will be anytime soon, he probably threw cooler parties though I guess I haven't been to a party you threw, and his paintings are pretty great too. If I win and we still can't get him back … I don't really know what he would have wanted. Possibly a massive museum, some sculptures, general encouragement of people being upset by his absence?"

Griffie gets another hug.

"I'm sorry for your loss.  We've got pretty good diamond-synthesis techniques if that helps this any."

“You’ve got pretty good carbon crystal synthesis, and when we tried to find Kenchlo’s soul … I’m not going to say we weren’t funding constrained but we were pretty close to not.”

"Ah, right, proper elemental matter."

She sighs.

"That's horrible and I'm really sorry I don't have anything that's more helpful."

"It's doable or it's not. …annoyingly, while 'they wouldn't want you to waste your life grieving' is a common argument, I'm pretty sure in Kenchlo's case he would absolutely want that if it, uh, would have incentivized us to try harder or something. Really I think our only path to him being alive would have been leaving him behind, though, and we discussed our, uh, ultimately inaccurate model of risks with him before we brought him home, I don't think at the time he even would have wanted to stay there knowing what we knew. Anyway. Daemon fight summary."

"Yeah."

"...should've fucking known the main plot would show up to fuck up the unambiguous side-plot win; I recognized this as an interlude!

"My own inadequacies in practicing analysis aside...

"Well, if you want someone to help see if you can make proper Earth diamonds, I might not have much immediately applicable skill, but I'm certainly willing to pick it up if only for the chance to contribute to magic.  I'm irrationally fascinated with magic, really, even moreso now it's real."

"If you want to self-study from alchemy textbooks I can't stop you, though I'd really recommend starting with nonmagical alchemy at the very least for background. I haven't made alchemy a priority here, and I can comment on applied bioalchemy but I wouldn't claim to understand the fundamental theory. And there are ever people with more user-friendly transferable magic here, I haven't had luck with that but it does happen. Do you want the rest of the summary? It was quite an incident."

"If you want to talk about it?  It sounds...it doesn't sound like it gets better."

"I think this is actually the low point, we ended up doing some good work and getting very lucky. The wizard attempted to summon help with a not-that-powerful summon, and got a very powerful and cooperative entity which wanted to answer the summons for its own reasons. The daemons had a lot of objectives that they ended up essentially flailing to cover. Everyone besides Kenchlo whom the daemons wanted dead got to live. The bibliodaemons wanted to do some massive redaction of the books we'd brought home and erase our memories of the matter, but they only touched one party member's memories, which was just enough to show us what erasure they were going for, and we didn't do a perfect job protecting the books but I'm sure we got more than they wanted us to get. The thanadaemons were trying to do some self-erasing ritual to the polymorph victims, and they got disrupted often enough during it and eaten before the end that it wasn't amazingly erased. Some of the daemons managed to run away, but a lot of them got destroyed, and the bibliodaemons destroyed themselves before the fight was entirely over, presumably because they knew too much to risk capture. Gotta know what to erase to erase it, and all. …and they tried to destroy the lenses they were using for targeting extradimensional spaces like where the books were, but they didn't reliably manage that, and we got to loot the thanadaemons too. …powerful entity may or may not be a very private person whose characteristics they would rather I not comment on, and I'll say no more about them."

"Yes, one does not meddle in the affairs of very private people, generally.

"...I'm glad you managed to secure things that feel like victory

"...Not that I'm disputing this being a win?  Just that, in addition to it being a win, it felt like one."

"I felt successful after it. Lots of leftover fervor. It was mostly later that I was sad about Kenchlo."