Everyone, except Syv who is currently sleeping in a ditch somewhere, leaves the Inn. The inn keeper shouts questions at them as they go, demanding to know whats going on and what that noise was and whats leaking through the ceiling. No one so much as even tries to offer an explanation. Instead they all march back to the hayloft in a tired clump and pass out in the hay. They wake up a few hours later, at sunrise. The hayloft has no roof, nothing to protect them from the brutal morning light shining in through the stained glass window. Worse yet, the light reflects off the aluminum grass outside and forms a massive, blinding mass of white that shines straight into the lower district like a spotlight. Despite valiant efforts of tossing, turning and covering their heads, no one can manage to sleep through the light.
Marcus and Alanna head down into the carthouse and get the promised crawler and cart, driving both of them out into the open area outside the lower district. Though early in the morning, there are already large crowds of metal farmers gathering around the main cart house and store houses in the lower district, and summoning some kind of magic creature into their midst would be a rather poor idea. Bethro follows, carrying the tarp, while Bill takes up the rear. Once they've gotten far enough out of town to be inconspicuous Bill digs the grimoire out of his bag. The grimoire is quite a large book, heavily bound with leather and held closed with straps and buckles. The actual pages are nothing like a normal book, instead they are tightly folded sheets of paper that are several feet across, almost like a road map folded up and sewn into a book. Each bundle of paper is sealed shut with a red ribbon and several wax seals. Bill looks through the available bundles, squinting at the cryptic symbols pressed into the wax before deciding on the one he wants. He carefully tears it free from the twine bindings and breaks the seals before unfolding it and laying it out on the ground. The paper depicts not a magic circle or any sort of comprehensible mystic form; instead it is a mass of overlapping shapes and colors, almost like an abstract painting mixed with random bits cut and collaged out of a geometry textbook. For a minute or two everyone just sort of sits and waits, staring at the paper and waiting for something to happen. Bill shifts back and forth on his feet nervously, feeling very much like a cart driver with a dead horse, before he suddenly remembers something.
"AH! Wait. It needs..." he opens the grimoire back up and flips to the back cover. In a small pocket sewn into the inside of the back cover is a tool. It looks like a capital "L" made out of silver, but a bit more curved and angled, like it was part of some sort of fancy font. He pulls the angle out and starts carefully circling around the paper. "Its here...somewhere....there!" he knees down and places the silver L down on the paper, pressing it firmly with his thumb into a matching blank space created by the intersection of several lines. Blue sparks pour out of under the tool and ignite the paper, which burns with a neon blue-green flame. The fire spreads rapidly outward, consuming the paper but leaving the strange jumbled lines behind, each one now made of blue flame instead of ink. The lines lift from the ground and begin to move of their own accord, drifting into place and seemingly snapping onto an unseen shape. Within a few seconds the lines have come together like puzzle pieces to form a hovering line drawing of a strange chimera: A huge scorpion with pincers big enough to snip a man in half at the waist that has an equally massive hooded cobra instead of its normal stinging tail. The outline glows brighter and brighter before detonating in a soundless, heatless, blue fireball. And in its place stands the chimera it depicted, all black carapace, claws, scales and fangs. The insect half sits motionless, but the snake half is in constant movement, twitching and looking around, darting side to side and tasting the air with a tongue as thick as a child's arm.
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Topic: WIZARDS!: ZAP (Read 76658 times)