Ky will help with the excavation if they'd like another pair of hands!

They'd appreciate it! Once enough rock is moved for the family to get out and Ember has healed them, one of them will ask Kybele if she's new in Kenabres.

"I am - in fact, I don't even remember how I got here! But there's been too much to do to dive into that mystery. Right now I'm recruiting. I have a recommendation of a Thall! Is that you?" she asks the plumed fellow.

He looks a bit nervous at the question, though he does his best to hide it, and is perhaps a bit upset he doesn't have a good excuse to demand to know who's asking.

"Yes, that's me."

"Thall, if you'd be willing to lend me your strength tomorrow at first light I mean to have a crack at fixing the wardstone. I'm Kybele the Curator, and the Storyteller said I'd be able to."

"I don't know who this storyteller is, but of course I'm willing to help with the wardstone. Anything for our fair city!"

"Marvelous. We assemble outside the temple of Desna at dawn."

That seems to relax him quite a bit, actually. 

“I’ll be sure to be there as soon as I finish my prayers to Iomedae.”

"Then we'll see you then!"

A trio of Schir seem to think that two young ladies, one of them unarmed, are well within their ability to ambush. By the time they notice otherwise, it's entirely too late; Ember puts two of them to sleep mid stride, and even all three together wouldn't be a match at all for Kybele.There seem to be more signs of demons as they travel north, but the area between the festival square and defender's heart is pretty clear, so nobody tries for a repeat.

"I'm going to go underground, collect my brother, update the neathers," Ky says to Ember. "Do you want to join me there?"

"I've never heard of the neathers, which means if they needed help I wouldn't have known to come give it to them. Yes, I think I would like that."

"I think they'll like you too."

Back to where she left the ladder and down into the depths.

There are still some neathers waiting at the bottom, although not that many; quite a few of them seem to have dispersed, heading back to their villages or out hunting or finding somewhere private. Horgus Gwerm is, of course, not currently there, but Iskander shouldn't be too difficult to find.

"Iskander! Things are quiet enough up top that I want you with me. This is Ember. Ember, my twin, Iskander."

"Hello! Your sister seems very nice, so I bet you are too. Do you also use paper like she does?"

"Nah, I'm a mushroom guy, and way less so."

"Mushrooms are very interesting! I think I can figure out how to grow plants later, and I can talk to animals, but I can't do anything with them. Can you use them to make lots of food to feed people, or make them glow so they can be used as a light source?"

"I can make them tastier. Or grow a little faster. It's not that useful."

Meanwhile, Ky goes to update the chief on the situation - plenty of demons around, most active fighting subsided but still the best time is likely to be after she fixes the wardstone sometime tomorrow late morning.

Legacy of the first crusade as they are, neither chief Sull nor any of the other mongrels know what the wardstone is, but they're sure she'll deal with it just fine. They'll make plans to head up tomorrow; hopefully Lann will be back with the kids by then, but they don't seem too optimistic.

Ember, meanwhile, will set about to seeing if any of the neathers are injured. She doesn't heal as much as Dyra did, nor can she get multiple people in one go, but she doesn't charge for it or seem to run out, and on the rare occasion someone isn't fully healed by it she can make a short chant and fix them up the rest of the way.

Ky isn't in a terrible hurry right now and will wait till she's done before heading back up.

It won't be terribly long at all; there aren't that many neathers that got injured in the last day or so, and Ember is relatively quick about the actual healing so a lot of the delay is her making conversation so she can learn about what life is like underground.

"It turns out they mostly had the healing they needed, as long as they could work or had friends willing to help them, so it wasn't too bad for most of them. They seem remarkably close to each other, at least when they're from the same village; it's hard to imagine what Kenabres would be like if everyone up there had the same sense of community. Lots of them used to be scared that something would happen to their friends and family after the ground started shaking yesterday and some kids disappeared, but you gave them some hope."

Ember smiles at her.

"I hope the kids are okay but it doesn't seem terribly likely. I think the success of the wardstone mission is the best way to help as many people as possible in the near term."