semi-open | spirit surveys.

[exequy]

WHO: Kostos & Mostly Mages
WHAT: Surveying spirits at Circles and battlefields
WHEN: Throughout the winter
WHERE: Various
NOTES: This is for rebel mage tasks. Involved mages are so so invited to toss up top-levels for their Circle/battlefield of choice, which can be exploration or spirit stuff or something else entirely. You're also free to bring an uninvolved/non-mage buddy along, with excuses made for the visit and the spirit aspect kept secret as needed, if you want to do your own CR stuff about visiting old haunts. And if you want to be involved but don't see a clear way in or need more preliminary planning first, hit me up and I will see what I can do.

The network of eluvians makes this prospect—visiting abandoned Circles, surveying battlefields from the Mage/Templar War—less daunting than it might have been before, but many of them still need to wait for some other work to carry the right people within a day's ride. Others need to wait for snowstorms to pass and roads to be cleared. The timing winds up erratic.

But the work itself follows a routine. Address mundane problems first, going around them rather than through them whenever possible. The Circles in the cities might have posted guards who need to be bribed or convinced or snuck around. Those in the wilds might be under occupation by vagrants or highwaymen who require the same. And any of them might have roving shades or veil tears to avoid while Kostos follows a more familiar former occupant through the halls, terse questions about where the fighting was worse, where the Harrowings occurred, or where the troublemakers were tossed emerging from the hood of his heavy coat.

Battlefields are easier. Most of them open spaces, many of them still sporting scars.

Sometimes nothing needs to be summoned; it's already there, running down a corridor in terror, and only needs to be persuaded to stop. Other times Kostos lays out summoning stones.

Comments

[aberratic]

She's already considering, mind spooling out from her again, taward Nevarra, Rivain, researching which Circles had the least number of abominations, what their practices were like, how they trained their mages—but Ness wrestles her attention back, grounds herself to the conversation here and now.

We, he said.

"I understand, Seneschal, and you're right, of course. It would be irresponsible, self-defeating, not to consider that perspective. Thank you, for your indulgence, and your advice."

There are those that might rail against having to prove they can be trusted to educate themselves; Ness isn't one of them. However she feels about it (bad, for the record), yelling about it won't change anything. They have to work with the world as it is, not as it should be—not as it is in Faerûn, hard as it can be to avoid the comparisons. This would never happen in the Sword Coast... But they're not in the Sword Coast. How things are there is immaterial.

"It can be... difficult," she says, soft, after a short pause, "to imagine a future after this war. So much is uncertain in so many ways, for all of us. I don't even know if I'll be here tomorrow," a prospect which she visibly has to Not Think About, "but I hope... I hope we have the chance to decide if this is really what we want to do with ourselves after. I like the idea of it."