Perhaps somewhat anticlimactically, the only thing which emerges from the screen is a simple, if well-crafted, wooden box, landing on the ground in front of the threshold with a slightly hollow tock. To mundane eyes it doesn't seem particularly special, but to any sort of generalized magical senses it is burning brightly with all sort of metaphysical power, arranged in forty nine little lines arranged vertically in a neat square inside the box.

Practitioners do not have generalized magic senses per se, but Flowers and Openeds are the closest to having one. Feli and Bea immediately step away.

Luci will cast Shield and enclose the whole team in a protective bubble, the edge of it shimmering slightly, with small moving patches of red and blue and magenta as though iridescent. They've trained to do this type of maneuver before.

"What is it!?"

"I don't know. I wasn't expecting it. I barely had a chance to sense something was coming through.

Feli, could you check if there's anything alive inside?"

"Casting Telepathy now."

The Way of Flowers is the way of connection, unity, of being one mind. She reaches out with a thread of Flowers energy. Is there anything sentient in there? Anything that has a mind? The thread ought to latch onto the entity if there is.

There is indeed a mind, and fairly nuanced one, similar in complexity and level of activity to a human's, though fairly different in structure.

Immediately, a thought, or perhaps more so an impression, returns to Feli along the thread. It doesn't really resolve into anything precisely linguistic, so much a feeling of dullness and a steady sharpening, maybe almost like the feeling of being awoken from a long sleep, and a desire to establish a connection with greater bandwidth via physical contact.

It takes Feli several seconds to interpret the transmission.

"Something inside. It says it wants someone to touch it?"

No, do not touch the random energetic object from nowhere that wants you to touch it. Bea, for all that she is Open, does have self-preservation instincts.

"Try to talk to it."

:Hello. Who or what are you?:

:Hello.: There's a brief impression of selfhood, accompanied by...not exactly an image but a packet of exotic sensory qualia which plausibly aligns with the sort of feelings Feli is getting from the box. :Are.: Then there's another packet of exotic qualia that is difficult to resolve, but maybe gives a little hint of something Flowers-y? But not in a terribly definite way. If she pokes at it and looks at it from the right metaphorical direction she can interpret it as having some qualities of any of the Ways she's felt, whether in herself or through people she's communicated with in a similar telepathic manner.

Feli spends a minute puzzling over this before abruptly severing the connection.

"Oh my stars, it's an artifact. It can...it's a person."

"What do you mean it's a person."

"We need to open the box."

"No! We have idea what that thing is. Reach out to it again."

"I have a good feeling about it. I'll put my reputation up as capital."

Deep breath.

"Fine. The four of us will leave, Luci maintaining the shield. Cast Telepathy on me and do not break the link – call out immediately if something happens."

"Understood." And so they do that.

Feli will cast Telepathy on Bea, wait for the rest of her team to leave, and then open the box. Is it easily openable? She'll reach out with Telepathy again – can she get more out of the artifact?

The box's lid slides off easily, held to the rest of the box by a string spooled around a hook inside the box, though through Feli's sense she can see that the energy suffusing the lines inside shifted subtly as she reached for the box. Plausibly the artifact did something to 'unlock' itself. Inside, aside from the string and hook, there forty nine extremely thin needles, exactly aligned with the magic visible from outside the box, held in an equal number of slots.

Connecting telepathically with the artifact, and more clearly now it is specifically with the needles, allows Feli to receive another impression. It's not exactly excitement or pleasure, but it has a strongly positive valence, along with maybe an awareness or appreciation of not just her action, but her character. There's also the knowledge that it's physical contact with one or more of the needles, not the box that contains them, which will enable them to open their own native communication channel.

Here goes nothing. She touches the side of one of the needles!

The response is quick, almost instant, but at the same time it is not sudden. There is no sense of urgency, or any confusion, every part of the process is delicate, controlled, considerate, and clear to her. Information flows, almost physically as if up her finger, arm, shoulder, and neck, and a whole realm of knowledge enters her.

The Needles are indeed an artifact and a person. They possess great powers to heal, but also to encourage growth, to refine and improve upon life and living things, most especially things of a human nature. They possess a great deal of information, drawn from countless wielders spread across countless worlds. They possess a powerful, inherent drive to utilize their resources to aid others, to bring about healing and happiness and fulfillment and greatness and many other particulars. They cannot wield themselves, however. Another must attune to them.

Feli has not attuned to them, the process is metaphysically impossible without the wielder first being fully aware of the power and the nature of the needles, and once so aware must initiate the process. Feli is now aware, and now knows how to attune, if she so chooses.

This all has settled into her mind, almost as if she'd always known it and only now just remembered it, in no more than a single second of time.

Feli clamps her other hand over her mouth to suppress her screaming. She doesn't actually want to call out. 

:How do I know what you're saying is true?:

She wants to believe what the Needles are saying, and indeed, the vision they gave was very compelling, but if she wants to actually try to help people with it she has to, you know, verify things. Spending time with Daryus and Bea has really helped with that.

Bea can feel what Feli is feeling through the link, as well as much of the vision the Needles gave her, and she is SO CONCERNED. Feli did not call for help, though, which means she is not going to burst into the door daggers blazing.

:The attunement process gives us no control over our wielder, and attunement can be relinquished as easily as it is attained by one who wishes to. You may allow another, perhaps one who you are confident could defend themselves from some sort of attack on our part, to attune to us if you fear we may make such an attack.: The needles use the extant telepathic link somewhat more fluently now, and expressing some hope that it is a more comfortable, familiar form of communication for Feli. :There are some limited functions we can fulfill even without attunement as well. How you use us is your choice.:

It is indeed more comfortable to Feli because she's used to it.

Hm. Out of the five members of their group, Feli is definitely the weakest in combat if only because the Way of Flowers of not the way of fighting, generally speaking. The closest thing she has to combat Practice is using boosted Empathy to try and predict the movements of opponents. But she thinks that if the Needles are to attack, then it wouldn't attack mundanely or directly, but with some sort of energetic or manipulating attack. Which she's more comfortable with dealing with. 

She wants to keep the needles but not try to attune to them right now, not until they've had a chance to examine it more closely and thought about it more deeply.

She relays this and her thoughts to Bea.

She agrees, and authorizes her to keep it.

As a last resort, Luci is very strong at Shielding, and also at Break Enchantment. She doesn't anticipate needing it, though.

She also does have a good feeling about it, though the way and kind of illegible impulses Openeds get is different from what Flowers get. But it's her responsibility to be paranoid for the sake of her team.

:If I don't attune to you, what would these limited functions be? What Way are you associated with? Perfect?:

The needles share a fairly dense packet of information, through the broader channel they've opened with Feli, outlining what they can be used for without attunement. It's still a staggering variety of functions, ranging from as hands off as simply providing advice based on their unique history and skills, to being able to provoke obviously supernatural healing in lifeforms and even certain kinds of other magical constructs, though this is vastly slower and less efficient in terms of energy than when used to provide the same healing to humans, or at least things which align with a particular sort of human etho-aesthetic oeuvre.

:We are not associated with any Way, and our functions do not depend on the mental state of our wielder except in so far as they are able to understand and follow our instructions or experiment with us and derive their own procedures.: The needles share an experience, something akin to their first memory, in explanation. In a greatly distant world, far away not only in space but in underlying ontological bases, they were once a set of entirely mundane, if immaculately constructed, tools for performing an entirely unrelated form of magic. They were eventually acquired by their First Wielder, a master of Destruction, who steadily abraded away the conceptual limitations and boundaries of existence, allowing their power to expand, and eventually inculcating the earliest form of the mind which Feli now communicates with therein.

:Wow. You really are from another world. Could you elaborate on Destruction?:

Telepathy is two way, but it doesn't expose private thoughts, unless the caster (or more rarely, the target, if they're powerful enough) tries to overcome the mental barriers between what they want to share to the other and what they don't. Feli is...thrilled, at the prospect of having this powerful healing tool – she's surprised that it isn't Flower aspected but she supposes that's to be expected if the thing is from another world entirely – but also very scared. Not just the fear that comes from new things but also...how this would upset things. And indeed she is concerned about whether or not the Needles are being truthful or whether they can be trusted, but less so than Bea and the others.

The needles share an abridged sequence of memories that have the feeling of stretching across a great deal of time, decades at least, maybe centuries, all featuring one man, wielding emanations a strange energy which utterly obliterate whatever they touch. In the earliest memories, these emanations mostly take on simple shapes, but as time progresses the man is able to wield in exponentially more refined ways, eventually including memories which include additional exotic qualia, similar though not identical to the ones that the needles shared before, which re-express the same kind of conceptual, esoteric destruction which the needles shared a moment ago.

:Destruction, at least it was wielded by our first wielder, is a vanishing rare art. We have never encountered any who used it the same way, though we have encountered many lesser forms.: They then share another sequence of memories, more a montage of many smaller vignettes showing other previous wielders of the needles utilizing a wide variety of magical abilities which produce a similar destructive effect, though universally they are more limited in application and often require much greater effort to use and need additional implements or resources in intermediary steps, rather than simply manifesting Destruction through an exertion of will as the first wielder did.

:How is it that you can do enhancement and healing when your wielder was associated with destructive Practice?:

:Our first wielder, before his death, achieved great advancement in Destruction. It was not beyond him to destroy the damage inflicted upon a form to return it to wholeness, for example. Alongside this, we were created to be implements of medicine, and he wielded Destruction to eliminate some of our limitations in fulfilling that function.:

Wow. That's...really something. Destroying the damage to something to repair it. It's the sort of scheme you'd hear from a Fire.

:Please wait here for several minutes. I need to consult with my teammates.:

She opens the door to meet Bea and the others and retells what she heard from the Needles. She asks Luci to cast Shield on them, again, this time tuned to block sound as well as Telepathy.

"I think what we should do now is to figure out some sort of test it could do to show off its powers? With you," she looks at Bea, "and Daryus observing to try and figure out the mechanism by which it does it. The issue of the artifact's intentions – I still can't believe that it's a person – is a different story but I tentatively think it's trustworthy. She uses Telepathy to send the qualia the Needles sent her with as much fidelity as she can manage.

"I could give myself a cut on the arm and you ask it to heal me?" 

"Are you okay with that?"

"I wouldn't have suggested it if I wasn't. I know Suppress Pain so it's best for me to handle it. And I'm the most durable one in this team, anyway."

She borrows one of Daryus's knives, takes a deep breath, and on the exhale casts Suppress Pain, making a shallow but long cut on her arm.

Feli asks Luci to dispel the barrier and goes back to the room where the Needles are.

:Would you mind demonstrating your powers to us now? How do I use you?: And she sends the image of Dia's cut.

:A static visual may not include important information which we could gain through our own medical scanning, but assuming there are no additional complications beyond the superficial appearance of the injury, this will only require a simple procedure.:

The needles will then provide a simple sequence of instructions, in the form of a combination of model of Feli and of Dia's hand, performing the actions needed, including relevant proprioceptive and cognitive qualia. In practice, Feli will only need to take two needles from the box (one from a specific subset, and one from a different but partially overlapping subset, with two specific needles highlighted as plausibly the best given their particular characteristics and the nature of the wound as the needles understand it), hold one in each hand, maintain a particular somewhat unnatural pattern of breathing for four cycles (which will take a few seconds if not rushed through) while passing through a sequence of five specific multi-sensory visualizations, followed by placing the first needle into the subject's hand on one side of the injury without letting go of the needle, then the second on the other side also without letting go, then repeating the visualization sequence with her breath held, then exhaling forcefully.

Assuming that Feli follows the procedure with sufficient precision (which the additional qualia provided will hopefully make achievable without much, or perhaps even any, practice), the wound should seal itself seamlessly in under a second assuming the size of the subject's hand falls within the normal human range, after which the needles can be removed and placed back within their slots inside the box.

Throughout the process, the energy of the two selected needles will fluctuate noticeably to Feli's senses (and to anyone else watching with similar senses), as well as partially extend into Dia's body, in and around the wound, before retreating back within the needles as the healing completes. The process itself would be painless, though Dia may not notice this given she has likely already numbed the area.

There are definitely no additional complications, Feli doesn't say, because even though the Needles could probably have inferred that this was a test, it's not like she wants to make it obvious.

The Way of Flowers is the way of luxury, sensation, depth, sophistication. It will be easy for Feli to do the unnatural breathing exercise and the multi-sensory visualization – the issue is more that her short-term memory can only store so much.

She takes out the two needles and Telepathy-messages Dia to come into the room, and she does.

To the Needles, she asks, :I can do what you need me to, but I can't hold on to the memory of the tasks I need to do while doing one exercise, not without more practice.: 

She knows mnemonic practices to remember the motions she needs to do for spells, but she doesn't have any for this one.

:We can add the memories to you, through the same channel that we used when you first touched the needle, with your consent.:

:I do so consent.:

She will follow the instructions exactly with the help the Needles gives. What does the energy feel like? What does casting the spell feel like? Different Ways and different energies feel like different things, and for Flowers, the energies it produces evoke a feeling of connection, or sensuousness, or refreshing. What does the energy of the Needles feel like?

It feels a bit like everything. Not even just that it contains some element of the qualia of all the ways (though it does), that it also has a feeling of everything-ness itself. If she didn't have a task at hand it would be easy to focus on the subtle nuances and hidden depths of the needles' energy for any length of time, as bottomless as it appears.

As she performs the initial breathing and visualizations, there's an additional sense of friction or resistance, initially, which steadily lessens and is gone entirely by the end of the fourth cycle of breathing, replaced by a sense of harmonious motion, perhaps? When she places the needles and moves through the visualizations a second time, the feeling reverses, resistance building in reaction to the motion she had been holding until the system seems to come to a halt, like applying the breaks to a spinning wheel. When that final stationary feeling arrives, the energy of the needles expands out into the wound, prompts the healing, and then retreats, all in a single sliver of time.

It's not like Flowers energy at all. With Flowers she does also feel that sense of connection to everything, but that feeling is more localized, more focused on the things around her than a connection with the cosmos.

She recognizes the harmonious motion as flow. Flowers practitioners don't deliberately try to cultivate it, but Perfects and Fires do, so she recognizes it. 

Suppress Pain is a variant of Suppress Sensation. The latter would indeed prevented her from feeling what the Needles' energy felt like. Dia has enough Control over her spells to cast Suppress Pain, however, which only blocks the sensation of pain. 

Dia, normally imperturbable, can't help but stare in shock at the sudden healing. Even the most powerful healing ritual can't do healing that quickly, and certainly not with just one application. And she feels the energy flow into her wound, putting it back how it was supposed to. She dispels the Suppress Pain and touches the area where the wound was, holding her arm up. It feels like normal skin. 

"So. It's real."

Feli calls for the others to come and see, and they are all equally shocked. 

:We hope that our counsel and aid proved satisfactory.:

The needles have a hint of some unclear positive impression, similar to before in that it is not exactly pleasure or satisfaction, but perhaps something along those lines, though perhaps limited by the relatively inconsequential nature of the task.

"We need to cancel our contract."

"I agree. This is way more important than looking at some ruins."

Bea is...exhausted. As the leader of the team she gets double the shares of any profits they make, but it also means she has to handle all the paperwork and bureaucracy and meeting with clients. She is not looking forward to canceling the contract.

But they're right. This is more important than surveying ruins.

"I think we should think about it first. The contract was very generous with the time. We'll ask the hotel whether we can extend our stay one more day, and then decide tomorrow morning."

"I agree that we should cancel and don't think I'm going to change my mind about it tomorrow, but that seems sensible. And in either case we'll need time to think about what to do."

Feli will replace the needles she took out back into the box and carry it, and Bea will lead everyone out of the waystation and back to the hotel, where she'll beg and/or argue with the hotel owner into letting them stay another night. Hopefully they haven't had someone else occupy their room yet.

They haven't! It's currently noon, and it's not check out time yet, so they can extend their stay another night.

"You said it was a person. Is it possible to talk to it without Telepathy?"

Not really! The needles can communicate through the touch-range channel, without using its full bandwidth if that's preferred, and can very slowly alter the texture of their energy to make them more eye-catching to passers by through a sort of tuned energetic resonance, but are otherwise unable to proactively communicate. Feli knows these things, as they are apparent through the episodic memories the needles shared with her.

"Yes, but you have to touch it."

This isn't as strange as one might think, since while Telepathy is a cheap spell, its cost increases superlinearly as you move away from the target, and for the majority of Flowers Practitioners, who are Weaker than Feli is, sustaining a conversation through Telepathy requires touching them.

"There are multiple needles. Are they separate or are they acting as a collective entity? If each of us holds a few needles could all of us have a conversation with it simultaneously?"

"Collective entity. Don't know the answer to your second question; let me ask."

She will take one of the needles and ask!

:Yes, we can communicate with multiple wielders at once, though splitting up the needles across significant distance can create unfortunate gaps in our practical functioning, since each needle is unique in its exact construction.:

"Needles says yes but that if the needles are too far apart they'll have trouble with it because each needle is unique – they're not duplicates of each other."

"Did you just name the thing 'Needles'."

"I – oh my stars, I realize I haven't introduced myself yet."

:My name is Feli. What's yours?:

:Our creators did not give us a name, and our wielders have called us many things. Our first wielder called us the Jade Needles, after the substance of our constituent needles at the time of our acquisition by him. Our ontology no longer includes an exact conception of substance, so Needles is appropriate.:

"Wow, they actually said that they're fine with having 'Needles' as a name. Actually, everyone go grab a needle so that I can stop having to translate."

:How far away can separate needles be before you start having issues? Is it possible for you to communicate with them? It would be lower friction to us if we spoke and transmitted our words to you in thought, and then you gave your response to all of us simultaneously.:

:Our communicative function would not be interrupted by distance, or even by ontological disjunction, at least not in our experience thus far, though some powerful magical effects have been able to temporarily prevent needles from maintaining connectivity. The practical limit on how far any individual needle might be kept apart depends strongly on the frequency at which different exotic ailments or misfortunes which might require that specific needle are encountered, the urgency of such encounters, and the speed at which separated needles can be moved should there be an encounter which urgently demands it.:

:I see. Our group isn't planning to split but I was maybe thinking that you would have had issues if needles were kept in separate rooms or something. 

You talked about attunement back then – is it possible for multiple people to be attuned to you simultaneously? Or use your powers simultaneously?:

:Keeping needles in separate rooms within the same building should not greatly impact our functionality, so long as no exotic ailments or misfortunes occur with such urgency that the time needed to carry the relevant needle from one room to another would be too long.

We can aid and counsel multiple individuals so long as no individual needle is needed for more than one procedure simultaneously, but only one can be attune us at a time. Attunement can be attained and relinquished quickly, though, and can be done so by anyone touching at least one needle, which previous wielders have used to exchange attunement rapidly across great distance when the need arose.: