"Convincing them to stop it safely themselves is best; it's usually easy to dismantle your own ritual safely if necessary. It's possible to identify the magnitude and realm of a ritual with a simple incantation, if you learn any of our magic; that and a list of rituals in Imperial lore will generally give you a good idea of what they're doing. Spring and Summer rarely give useful information, if you're worried about information on weaknesses I suppose Winter might, Autumn gives information on connections, Day on factual information, Night does a broader range of less straightforward visions and so on.

The symbolism and powers invoked have to have at least something to do with the effect, although it can be subtle - you might want to learn the constellations, runes, eternals, dramaturgic personae, Silutarian modes, and Paragons, those are the major modes of casting that have subtle meanings. Oh, and maybe the animal and bird totems but those are generally pretty obvious."

"Do you have books on those that I can have copied? Or get copies of, if you have an easy way of making them."

"I expect our stargazer will be able to show you around the libraries. We do have a small printing press but it's only really good for pamphlets."

Right on cue here's another guy following Adolphus down to the bridge head.

"...is this permenant?" is his first question.

"It is," he grins, though with a bit less enthusiasm than he had half an hour ago. "I'm Kiraavi, I'm something not entirely unlike an Eternal from another world; we're trying to figure out whether and how I can operate here without causing too much fuss, particularly if people try to use magic on me."

"Aulus Cascade. You - shaped this like it was part of your Realm? Is that real white granite?"

"That is real white granite," confirms the architect.

"I use a bit of a different paradigm than that, but it's a little like a Realm, yes. My kind of being is primarily made up of terrain, in my case roads, and we can arrange ourselves however we like within the limitations of our type."

"...okay, so, not Realm magic at all, more a kind of magical creature thing?

Is it, uh, going to move? Is putting a cart across it going to hurt you? I guess that wouldn't make it a very good road so... uh, do the roads have to be contiguous?"

"I might spread out from here, but this part isn't going to move unless I have some reason to re-grade it, and there's no reason whatsoever to avoid pulling carts here. It's more comfortable to be contiguous, or failing that to have all my parts within a mile of some other part, but I'll be fine in any case, I have plenty of discontinuities at home."

"...there isn't really a lot within a mile of here, sorry. I'm - kind of assuming the others have done all the politics bits with you? Did someone detect magic?"

"Uh, yes, me," replies Adolphus. "It, uh, wasn't very conclusive? Insight seems to be a bad idea but detect magic was pretty safe, there is definitely a lot of magic but it isn't, uh, bitey?"

"If you don't mind?" he asks Kiraavi.

"Go right ahead. And don't worry about the discontinuity, if I was concerned about it I would have asked before I made the bridge."

"Ophis!" declaims the Stargazer, then blinks rapidly for a bit. "Yeah, that's... that's something all right. Almost like the entire thing is a giant magic item? I mean, sorry, that you're a giant magical item. Uh. I'd ask to try Bright Lantern but I'm not sure it's actually going to help, I think it'd just give me circular answers."

"I don't think I have questions about my nature, exactly - I'm new here but there are plenty of us in the world I'm from, and we know how we work fairly well. But I understand that people here are liable to take it as a challenge when they notice that physical damage doesn't bother me very much, and I'd like to know how worried I need to be about your magic in that regard."

"Oh! Well, it's not at all clear from your magic signature what's going to stick and what isn't.

Because you're kind of a person, a place and an object I suspect you can be targeted by all three of those... But you're not a whole region so place magic is going to be limited to divination.

We could try some things that are easy to remove - actually, you can probably be targeted by anointing and hallow and consecration if you define an area of yourself well enough or someone puts a tent up on you or something.

So we should probably try those and Freedom Of The Soul first, see if they have an effect, and... hmm, do you have access to personal mana? I've got a Circlet but that needs to be powered by mana, we'd need one of those swords or something if not - and that's a good question, can we even bind an item to you..."

"I don't know what any of those are, yet."

"Anointing, Hallow and Consecration are ways to attach a Virtue aura to a person, an object or a place; a Virtue aura is a set of - inclinations - that guide you towards Virtue. It can be taken off again by the same mechanism, or it naturally fades away at the solstices and equinoxes.

Freedom of the Soul is a very simple Night enchantment which heightens emotions and emotional responses. It can be removed by replacing it with an anointing, or by overwriting it with another enchantment - there are many with very minor effects, like the Day enchantment that lets you strike harder once with a bladed weapon - or it fades on its own within a day or two, often less if you have any major exertion or excitement."

"And we should really work out some safe way to try curses, but they're naturally detrimental and have a long duration and are hard to fix, so I'm not sure how to get that done safely... maybe the curses that rely on physical damage wouldn't be a problem? But they might turn out to be a real problem and then you're stuck like that for a year - or at least you'll have to sell a few white granite bridges and buy a large ritual team that can make the serpent's stone, I guess..."

"Would I be able to hire a team here, or is that going to be more complicated? But we should start with the less dangerous things in any case, I'd say, presumably the results will generalize at least a little."

"We don't have that much Night here, Auric Horizon might be able to put it together? But probably for something of that magnitude we'd be looking at going to Anvil. And you probably want to know what you were getting into before you go there, right?

I can do Freedom of the Soul right now - but you might want to line up what anointment you want with Sextus before you're affected by it, I guess? So that we can chuck it on you straight away if you hate it."

"Sextus is indisposed for doing ceremonies right now, so it'll have to be me! Uh, I'm devoted to Pride, so you can have," she gets out a little notebook with meticulous handwritten notes and scans over them to get her summary right, "a keen sense of self-worth, feeling especially proud of a specific thing you name when you get it, wanting to keep your culture and customs, feeling more committed to follow through on your promises? Just one of those, that is, not all of them at once!

I'm afraid I don't do consecrations or hallowings though, I haven't learnt to do those ones yet. It's pretty similar though, if anything the anointing is the more powerful one..."

"Does it matter if I name something I'm already proud of?"

"It actually usually works best that way, you'll feel an urge to - demonstrate, exemplify it?"