"You cannot forestall sleep, food, or drink forever. But two weeks should be well within your limits."

"We're going to need to hear the details of everything before we finalize anything. But that does seem like a strong argument."

"Also this way I won't wear you out after we win."

"Certainly I can give you details," Eleanora says, ignoring the byplay.

"Aura Awakening reinforces strength, speed, and toughness; a child with aura could beat the strongest mundane in the world. Carapace wraps you in armor, stronger with more energy cost, possible to switch on and off with good reaction time."

"Breeze is the basic Wind magic, and creates gusts which can push people around at a few meters distance. Gale can accelerate massively from a cold start, and at its limits can be used to glide. Vacuum creates an extremely destructive wind bomb. It can be thrown short distances but slows to a stop, and hangs in the air until it explodes. All-Noise creates silence, amplifies sound to deafening levels, or at its limits shatters bones with ultrasound pulses."

"Trick fools any senses, change your appearance and voice, and the immediate area. Needs great concentration for complex illusions. Greater trick is similar but could change a whole building at once with perfect focus. Best with a teammate taking advantage or luring someone into a trap. Disguise lets you disguise living beings other than the caster. Many targets can be affected at once, with the same face and voice or with enough focus different ones."

"Abstinence replaces the need for sleep, food, and water, though this is imperfect and unstable in the long run. Mend allows your natural healing to speed up drastically, and with skill can affect others slowly. Brutal enough wounds like my own can't be mended. Wave Tracking sends energy in all directions and returns the souls present, like radar. Mages look different to this sense, but detected mages can notice they've been detected by a wave tracker, though they will not know who or from where."

"Mend sounds underwhelming in the short term. What else is there in Life and Illusion I could get with the same alms?"

"In Life, there are three other specialties. Self-Suggestion creates a state of intense focus that tunes out distractions and interference and thinks faster. Prolonged use creates backlash which is exhausting and impairs logical reasoning, or brain damage in dire cases. Vital Exceeding lets you trigger your body's self-destructive capacities on demand, much like stories of mothers lifting cars to free their children and then both being in the hospital for weeks. Difficult to use without lasting damage but possible. And Outward Awareness is a sixth sense for personal danger, feasible but expensive to keep running constantly. Any of those would leave you one spare alm for a relic."

"Probably self-suggestion, but let's hear the others."

"Blackout creates a dense, dark fog across an area, affecting everyone nearby. It is less sophisticated, but also much easier to create quickly without focus. Decaying spirit is a direct attack on the mind of the target, needing close proximity. It damages morale, worsens mental response to trauma, and can with extended effect cause severe mental illness, but short of that will fade when the caster is no longer close. Astray Whisper is magic I'd forbid under other circumstances. It implants a simple order into a non-mage which they will carry out as best they can, realizing why only after they are done. Minutes to implant. Whisper would take all four alms; the other two would leave a leftover alm."

"No, Tarsa."

"I wasn't going to. No playing games with these stakes. And besides, I'm going to be stuck with you."

"Okay. As long as we're agreed that we're not messing with civilians like that."

"We are. I promise. Illusion doesn't seem worthwhile. Hmm. I could pick up a little Puppeteering or Void?"

"You could. Basic Puppets would be three alms of your four. In void, you could pick up the basic dark-sight for two, and could add Quagmire for the other two. That creates traps on placed surfaces, which suck in whatever touches them with great force, needing great strength or external assistance. Base fire-calling is also three, as is the aura carapace that Tseonur is planning to select. You might also consider adding a permanent shaping to your aura - for four alms, you could make it permanently greatly improved at defense with a small reduction to offense or make it behave much like a spider's web at close range to entangle enemies. Or two offensive properties, but neither seems useful for your other choices of specialty."

"Oh, I like Quagmire too. Especially if we can predict where the puppeteer will be."

"Is that the Godiria guy, or the backup?"

"Backup number two, Rafe Lannin. Massive numbers of simple puppets, historically also did necromancy. Rai Godiria is an aura master who's probably enhanced the souls of himself and his two followers and is the only one who can remove a seal. Maren Prellea is extremely skilled with fire and can use it at greater range than normal. There are also some other mages we could rope in, but so could they."

"It's likely that reaching out to them will draw Godiria's attention to the others. Once your presence is felt, he will likely try to 'pick teams', so to speak. Five significant mages I know about, and four I suspect may be present."

"I'm leaning toward Quagmire. If we're trying to keep the war secret from the mundanes, dark-sight should be useful itself. But possibly we should be considering the potential allies?"

"The two we may already know are Luci Neila and Halam Jouen. Luci is a ghost-whisperer and can use them for scouting and to attack people's souls directly. Halam is an ambitious mage who wants to run the city, and within his territory he's a scary-good animator - makes the floor and tables attack, I think."

"There were also a cowardly space-folder, a liquid-animator with a grudge against the mage hunters, and the anchor of the city, who can do... something. What can Tamara do, Eleanora?"

"She is protected by various means she won't be able to replace if they break, and can use Wave Tracking across the entire city with remarkable precision.

The specialties of those who I'm unsure of are a Maren's younger likewise-fire-mage brother, a master illusionist who sent himself into a coma with wireheading, a manufactured bodyguard who obeys any mage who claims him as master, and a devoted family man with magic-copying power and a long string of serial killing."

"Well, aren't those delightful."

"I think most of the good people died fighting the war against the mage-hunters that left Almia the last place in the world with magic."

"I would say less 'good people' and more 'people who work nicely with others'. The Oro Corporation which made Arthur, and formerly employed Lannin, were not nice people, but they were civilized ones who worked together. Many of them died fighting the Inquirium, and the rest largely got picked off when Oro fell apart. And the Godirias were good people - Rai probably still thinks he is one - and they didn't even die to the war, as best as anyone knows."

"I barely know anything about them and I already want to murder the shit out of the Inquirium. I assume that is going to be very difficult."