"I'm pretty sure I've given you the information we had at the time, but go ahead and ask more questions? I don't know what you'd base a prediction on here, but your method is supposed to sometime let you get information from stuff I didn't think would be useful, so I thought I'd offer an opportunity. I can go on if that's not useful here."

"No, the - what sort of celestial are you going to try and call, what are you going to ask them, what would be good to have asked them...

"'I'm going to try and summon a Celestial for advice' isn't...really...something you make predictions about.

"It's just a thing you're doing.

"And the sort of advice I'd give here is mostly 'save the spell slot unless you actually have someone who can read the books handy or the outsider in question will be able to read the book you have'.  You've already gotten celestial input.  Getting more celestial input...is kind of redundant, unless there's more specificity to what you can request in that context."

"Oh! Planar inquiries are 'you send a letter and a payment, you get a response based on that', and they're often used to hire experts. As for predictions, you could say 'it turns out all the relevant celestials are too overworked to respond', 'all the relevant celestials are extinct or in hiding', 'the Upper Planes really wanted to communicate something unrelated to you and doesn't send the person you requested', 'the call doesn't go through', et cetera. And the celestial we have on our team is not actually the most intelligent or powerful. She's spent a lot of time in a library but she isn't an expert researcher. Her main work-relevant strengths are aerial ranged combat and teleportation."

"I'm putting a high chance on you not getting a particularly useful Celestial, maybe two in three, but I wouldn't be surprised if you got a Celestial that's theoretically useful but maybe only one additional useful fact such as the name of the seal-shocked Crook."

"Which is absolutely going to be important, by the way."

"The actual result we got here was that the spell fizzled, and the wizard concluded from that and observations that the fog was extraplanar, we were experiencing a large-scale planar blending effect, and our means of contacting the outside including our emergency line to Axis weren't going to work."

"Yeah, that was included in 'not getting a particularly useful outsider' and also I already predicted planar blending."

"So you did, good work there. This is the point where we found out at the time. If we'd been able to confidently predict that earlier it would in fact have been useful. …not sure how much earlier, but there would have presumably been a point where we could have still brought in the spacetime police."

"Yeah.  Alright, shall we continue?"

"We speculate about plane details more – there's a strong effect leaking over of sealing extraplanar interaction options, suggesting the 'prison' title is applicable. We try a really long-shot attempt to use a portable extradimensional space to bring in the spacetime police anyway, and it fails. We discuss some options, and the groom tells us the town wants us to look for the origin of the effect and drop off a message from them to the fae conclave if we're in the area. We check if our summon spells work, they don't. We're also asked to see if we can end up in contact with the druid Devarre, the town's usual contact with the conclave, and we get a map with indications of things including Devarre's rough area. Groom says he managed to talk the council out of trying to demand restrictions on us. And we make plans to head Devarre-wards. I inspect the changing leylines to see if they indicate much about Rhoswen, and they do have a tendency to enhance shadow magic, fey magic, pseudo-real creation, teleportation and interplanar magic, and scrying. I can go into detail on our overland transit plans if they interest you, but I'm not sure they do?"

"Overland travel isn't really something I have input on, no.  ...About the spacetime police, I have an irrelevant question...is your emergency contact method putting a portable hole in a bag of holding?"

She cracks a small, shyly sheepish grin.

"Alright, hmm.  Devarre.

"Not insignificant chance they're already dead, but it's definitely worth trying to get in touch with them and the local fae, who presumably aren't interested in being couped.  That or they're in on it, but I doubt it.  If there's an invasion from a sealed evil in a can, there ought to be allies.  ...though how Tenzekil found out about Rhdbvghl whose name I have already forgotten existed, probably needs an explanation.  ...If it's not the having immortality and thusly being pre-sealing..."

"Our emergency contact attempt was using a small mirror-associated pocket dimension and breaking a crystal we were issued within it. Axis does not want to incentivize people to create messes just for their attention. And the queen's name is 'Rhoswen'. …we actually didn't spend enough time talking about her to end up assigning her a nickname that I can remember offhand, huh. Anyway."

"Anyway, we head towards Devarre. We start off with a conjured carriage, but we're concerned about some fog interactions because it's a pseudo-real creation, so we ditch it. We find some lumberjacks cursed to be lost and we un-curse them … pretty easily, it breaks when we get them in sight of each other. Plausibly a prank from the local fae to discourage logging? We travel, we do some summons testing which suggests we can get at least some summons, we sleep, we wake up due to an intruder being detected. Someone presenting as a local dryad whose grove is being attacked, asking for our help."

"Highly unlikely the carriage would've exploded, honestly.  It worked in the first place and presumably kept working, and you were already on the inside of the wards.  Would've been different if your wizard had felt something hinky going on, but, nah.

"The lumberjacks...Yeah, likely not actually related to anything, just sort of there.  Still, that's evidence that the evil's tied to the forest.

"Alleged local dryad is very possibly a trap, but not one you can really afford to not spring; you need the information.  Ask them how the heck they found you; ask them if - and presumably how - they know who you are.  Their answers might be revealing; the weirdness with the trees earlier is...My brain thinks you might be able to dig out some evidence on whether they're friendly forces thereby.  But I'm leaning towards suspicion, because - this is Rhoswen's territory, now.

If there aren't internal control mechanisms up the ass, I don't know evil queens."

"Dryad communicated significant urgency, we didn't have time for a ton of questions."

"Background here: we'd also in the past gotten some prophecies about 'how do you save the souls of a forest's trees from a fire when you are not even there to stop it' and then later, after we thought we'd done it, 'worry more about forest fires'. So the wizard has a custom divination Locate Forest Fire and has a scroll of it. I've picked up Stabilize Nature Spirit, which helps spirits whose bonded natural feature is destroyed hold out for a replacement.
We, uh, did make a wand of it, but we don't have the wand, we made it for Friends of Trees in exchange for them covering materials costs, because it seemed like a good way of accomplishing the goal 'deal with forest fire we're not present for' and materials are expensive. We also have some info on specialized firefighting water elemental summons, which aren't workable here, and a firefighting halo magic item for our lantern archon, which is relevant. Sorry, I've been trying to tell things in order, but I didn't start at the beginning, because time. Anyway."

"So we use the scroll, we teleport in, there are in fact a bunch of spriggans attacking dryads. Axes, evil rituals, fire, et cetera. We fight the spriggans and win, with the interesting details that when we hit a spriggan with a blindness curse, it synergizes with the energies in the fog to … coat the spriggan in some magical-sensory-deprivation gunk, and that when the spriggans are clearly losing and we suggest the remaining conscious ones surrender, one of them says 'You think I would surrender? Queen Rhoswen owns me, what sort of fool do you take me for!'. In Sylvan, which we recognize, but with an accent we don't. We rescue a restrained unicorn, generally untangle tings, notice that the spriggans had been doing some kind of sacrificial ritual and cutting down paueliel trees, which allegedly have First World – uh, fae place connections. Dryads ask if Devarre sent us, we say we're looking for him. We discuss options for containing the unconscious spriggans, and the dryads say that Vinroot could do it if he weren't too drunk. And we go to interrogate the conscious-but-sensless spriggan."

"Not sure of the immediate relevance of the firefighting other than 'well, you've put enough effort into it that it not showing up somewhere dramatically relevant is a cop-out in story design'.

"...And would you look at that, internal control mechanisms up the ass.  ...Right, sacrificial ritual, faelinked trees...She's obviously trying to unbind herself, and crash her empire back into the 'real world'.  Prime Material, I mean.  Very probable that she can see through her minions and possibly target on them or at least target them; there's a present and persistent threat for perceived disloyalty.  On the other hand, she doesn't seem very cunning, just commanding; she should have had her minions feign surrender and strike into your backs, if she was maximally concerned with Winning This Particular Endeavour.  And were I in her position, this would be the time to do it; this is the one time she could play that card and hide it again for later."

"Why would this be the one time she could have her minions feign surrender and then do it again? And … we've dealt with that move before, at this point while we prioritize the safety of people who surrender to us we don't actually give them much leeway in situations like this."

"'cause if you vanish into the dark forest there's no way information concerning your fates makes it out.

"...Good policy."

"Also, this sounds like regular tactical and psychological analysis right now, not story analysis?"

"Yeah, and I mean, you're not wrong that it is.  The 'they should backstab you' thing wasn't particularly meta-informed.

"The 'evil queen has iron control of her underlings' thing is...a bit more character-based than that?

"Like...I won't deny that a lot of it was just mundane inference, but it's also...'I'm an evil queen, what would I do?'."

"…I think the reason evil queens do that in stories is pretty much just because it's both practical for them and scary-sounding to listeners?"

"Sure.  But either way I approach the question, I find the same answer.  And - mmmm.  There's a substantial sense in which the evil queen rules through fear, and the good through loyalty.  And that informs the actions they're likely to take and the ways you can manipulate them."

"…okay, so, trying to model the psyche of a queen is pretty useful, but if you demonstrate your ability to do that, it's not going to make me think you can model the psyche of the Divine Flow or such."

"The Divine Flow?"

"The source of prophecy, that which touches outsiders lightly and which gods have a spark of and dip their oracles into, is a seemingly non-Asmodean force involved in confining devils to their 'proper roles', et cetera. My wizard friend described it as a structure that sends some information from the future to the past, focused around large events in our reality, bound by a need for internal consistency. The Protean interrupting his lecture said that it also enjoys doing riddles, eating pranks, and wrapping things in proteans."

"...I doubt I could predict individual actions of the Divine Flow without a much more thorough peek behind the curtain.

"However, it's a force of Be In Character on the world scale.  If ever there was a blunt metaphor for keeping the story on its rails at the GM's will...I'd definitely place it there.  I'm not sure whether I should have said that."