As soon as the Princess disappeared (again) there was understandably a bit of a commotion, a princess vanishing once in their career is rare enough, but multiple times? Well suffice to say vanishing royals seldom make it to an encore, as the people who make them disappear the first time are usually the type who desire to keep it that way .

Luckily Elvira in an uncharacteristic display of level headedness managed to keep things a bit more settled than they would be otherwise by pointing out that gods were seldom so direct if they wanted a royal to vanish permanently, so odds were good that Rosalind, in her duty as a high priestess and Saintess was probably just consulting with her employers as it were, and the best thing to do was help her by making sure this damned place didn’t fall apart in her absence. So the next few hours were filled with the team fixing stuff that had gone wrong, Then Mandy smacking them one upside the head with a stick (got to get the message through a thick steel helm on an even thicker skull somehow right?) then repairing the aftermath of their repairs. (You let an amateur repair stuff of course something is going to go a bit pear shaped, usually that originally bore no resemblance to a fruit of any kind.)

Sure enough after a few hours of panic, people running round like headless chickens, and about fifty rolls of kraken tape there was a glow from the altar, as The Princess returned, accompanied by a frog from whom a single leg could probably feed a hungry village for a week.

“Princess, thank the gods you’re back,” Sir Leeroy said, getting into the guard stance on the principle that when you are confronted by an amphibian colossus it is usually best to err on the side of caution. (Yes that was in the guard manual, one of the writers had been something of a completionist, and must have written the most outlandish things in there under the theory that if they happened and weren’t in there boy would his face be red. He really thought he’d covered absolutely everything, but tragically his section failed to have a chapter dedicated to avoiding death by falling grand piano, a very glaring oversight, with the benefit of hindsight, given that was precisely what eventually did him in. Really it was such a tragic fate considering he worked his way up a lowly putter in the gem mines, all the way to the esteemed rank of guard captain, and even to commander, yet in the end still couldn’t avoid his fate of a piano hitting a flat miner.)

“At ease Sir Leeroy, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to kill my employer, Gods take a really dim view on that sort of thing. This is the Great God Wannashowa, and these are the Archangel Adrian, and The Archangel Cassie.”

As she spoke a figure with far more wings and eyes than any living being had any business having manifested behind the frog, causing all the mortals in the room to avert their eyes to avoid losing their lunch.

“Cassie knock it off.” The frog cautioned her. “No turning the mortal minds into mush alright? Most mortals are lacking enough in that department as is.”

“Spoilsport” the thing said, morphing into an attractive young woman in a very dapper suit with a page boy cut.

“OK so I’ve got Legal on this, and if we’re lucky they should have the approval letters by the end of the day. So as soon as they show up we can start getting this thing back up to power and doing what it does best.”

“Being confusing as hell, and freezing gator people in time jello?” Elvira asked.

“Well that and working well enough that we can get them out of there without causing a species to go extinct.” Mibbet chimed in.

“What? How? There’s no water hot enough to be liveable for them.”

“Well apparently my high priestess has a solution to that problem.”

“Yups, indeed I do, Addy I need you to talk to the others over the network, and commission a big carriage worth of solar crystals, the big ones. I’ll hand them a letter to let them redeem the cost from the treasury. These guys are our subjects, and if that machine fails they won’t last long. So it can come out of the emergency aid budget. I’d also like to employ a few constructs who don’t mind sand and a lot of heat to help spread the crystals around the area that floods. The Caymen made a machine that helped reduce the potential for drought for years, and now they need us the least we can do is return the favour.”

Sure enough from there the first salvage permit granted to a god was delivered unto Wannashowa, mercifully not on stone tablets as those buggers are heavy. Besides everything is thaumotological these days.

“OK then here we go, it’s time for the moment of truth.” said Wannashowa, “this is going to take a lot out of me, I just hope I can buy the time we need or we’re all screwed. But I was made to fix droughts, and here we are smack dab in the middle of a new desert, I’ve got a job to do.”

Wannashowa focused on the machine, the whole machine, and nothing but the machine, as somewhere deep within the divine instrument something stirred and pushed back. There was a God here, but it wasn’t THEIR God, they needed to figure out what was going on. Out on the etherscape the divine instrument reached out searching, desperately reaching out for their creator. But their energy was fading, and their functions failing.

Then something else stirred inside them, something even more important than even finding their maker. They were moulded with a purpose in mind, and they felt it, reaching out to feel the tiny mortal lives they held within them. In the grand scheme of things insignificant, yet somehow... the most precious things they had ever cared for. Now it was just a matter of choosing. Doing what was right? Or what felt right.