"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?"

"That seems like the best way to do it, then. - or, hold on..."

"...my Chosen has a good point; can you replace the anointing with a different instance of the same one, if it's stronger than I'm expecting, or should I go with the safer option over the more useful one? We're concerned about it overwriting the conceptual aspect of my domain rather than supplementing it."

"Once you've got the anointing on I can just take it away if you don't like it, takes about ten seconds, same as putting it on."

"That should be fine, then. Give it a minute, I think, to let me see what it does, but do take it off, I don't want to worry my Chosen. Does all this cost you anything, besides the time?"

"Yes, a dose of liao each for the anointing and removal, and a mana crystal for the ritual - if he's got it mastered, otherwise it's two - but you did just build us an entire white granite bridge so I kind of assumed it was covered?"

The Architect waits for a response, but definitely gives the impression that she's never knowingly turned down the offer of recompense regardless of whether considerable resources had already been supplied.

"Oh, no, you don't owe me anything for the bridge, that's what the toll booth is for. We can figure something out with trade goods for this part, if that's agreeable, and I should probably have some idea of how much I'm spending before I do it."

"One liao generally goes for just under one measure of the artisan materials, a mana crystal for just under two - our major currency is rings, so around eighteen rings a liao, twenty rings an artisan measure, thirty-eight or so for mana, although it varies around those price points."

"That sounds fine. What's the exchange rate of rings to crowns to thrones, exactly?"

"Twenty rings to the crown, eight crowns to the throne."

He thinks for a moment, and nods. "That'll be fine. I'll plan on making you that wagonload of granite, or weirwood planks if you'd rather, and I'd like to save at least half the funds from it unless we come up with something particularly good to spend it on."

"White granite's good, we mostly build out of that up here, even Weirwood isn't as good against the winter storms and we don't exactly have much in the way of forests.

So two thrones would cover just over eight mana or twice that in liao - the plan so far uses two liao and one mana, so there's six mana left in the budget before we have to think about it too much. Aulus is going to need to fetch some other people to spend the rest of the budget because he's a rainbow wizard."

"I can get to Bright Lantern with Adolphus! But if that's our budget we'd better pick what we're doing from the location rituals and item rituals carefully, pick one of Clear Lens or Shadowed Glass, or one of Skein or Bright Lantern - and I kind of want to try Cast Off The Chains Of Memory, I figure that will tell us about most of the mental effects along with Freedom of the Soul, unless we go up to curses but all the good ones are really expensive.

I really don't want to try Unfettered Anarchy or Withering Touch of Frost, if you're a place then I expect Frost would get all of the places you are..."

"Yes, let's not, the travelers wouldn't appreciate that. We can also plan to do more later, I'd just like to be a little more oriented first."