When they returned from their excursion, Cheis was surly and slightly drunk, and Linduin was distracted and daydreamy. As a result, both of them were beginning to get snippy with each other, and it was deeply fortunate that Umbria had already returned; adding Pellamin to the mix alone would have produced a dangerous blend indeed. But Umbria's officious, soothing presence mollified Pellamin, embarrassed Cheis into silence, and sent Linduin into a state of hormonally-induced muteness, and so the business of assigning lodgings and making plans for the next day went much more smoothly than it might have otherwise. An hour and another carriage ride later, Cheis and Linduin had arrived at a rather upscale hotel and were undergoing a pair of momentous discoveries; Linduin was discovering that if he set an alarm with his collar's clock function, the alarm would display as "Alarm00_fireTimer" in the collar's thought lexer if it was active, and Cheis was discovering that the hotel had wine on their room service list. She promptly ordered an entire bottle, told Linduin he was underage, and began pouring glasses for herself mechanically and determinedly.

"So what's it like to live here?" asked Linduin, taking advantage of his mentor's inebriation to bypass her typical stoicism. He doubted he would have another opportunity like this, and wanted to take maximum advantage of it.

Cheis hiccuped. "S'not so bad. Lotsa... amenities. Sandwiches instead of stew. Beer wasn' made in somebody's grain silo." She took another sip of wine. "Schools. Fulla nerds, but good books."

"What do you mean?" Linduin pressed. "There were schools back home. The provae, trade colleges, stuff like that, right?"

Cheis laughed. "Crap, kid, tol' crap. Crown City has, like, one uni. This city s'got five. An' lotsa people doing actual research, n'stead of jus', like... repeating what they're told." She hiccuped again. "Not that they're hot shit, or anyth'n." She went to take another sip of her glass, frowned at the recognition that it was empty, and blinked owlishly at it for a moment before having an apparent epiphany and refilling it happily.

"So... there are good mages here? Better than you?" Linduin smirked.

Cheis laughed so loudly that she accidentally let out a number of simultaneous bodily noises of a rude nature, and carried on laughing uproariously for many minutes while Linduin waited patiently for an answer. Eventually, she managed to choke out a negative. She might have left it at that, but the wine drew forth things she might not normally have said. "Buncha cargo cult copypasta clods, all of 'em, kid... wouldn't know an iterator from a imitator if it bit 'em in the cingulate gyrus." She took another sip. "Ain't a one of 'em that knows the first thing about thaum grammars, let alone metagrammars. Even th'... damn archmage here barely knows how to do a macro."

"Sounds like a lot of very technical terminology," said Linduin breezily. "Did you invent all the terms yourself, too?"

"Sorta. S'complicated." Cheis waved her glass in a sort of wishy-washy motion, spilling a good bit of wine. "Compiler does most of... of the work. Some terms I got from Shul books. Others I made up. Shared lexicon... same root language, if you go back far enough." Linduin filed away each term as she let it slip for future reference.

One facet of her statement, however, interested him more than the others. "You speak their language?" He asked. Linduin knew very little about the Shul Empire -- barely more than its name, in fact -- but this seemed like a noteworthy fact nonetheless.

To his disappointment, however, Cheis shook her head. "Tol' you. Compiler analyzes... root patterns. Wake up with new terms. S'handy." She shrugged, fumbled her wine glass, and dropped it. Regarding it thoughtfully on the floor, she decided that there was an efficiency to be implemented here, and simply began drinking straight from the bottle.

"And this... compiler. You found it in a book from Shul?" Something told Linduin that this was the most important question he could ask.

"Nah," Cheis gasped, coming up for air. "That I made. Accident. Younger'n you. Mashed two spells together without knowin' what I was doin' an' got lucky." She let out a belch and slumped onto a couch. "Scuse me." Her eyes began to drift closed.

Linduin paused, contemplating whether to make one final push or not. Finally, he found that he could not resist the temptation. "I guess it must have been a long time ago. You probably don't even remember which two spells."

Cheis's eyes flew open, indignant; she usually kept her pride quiet, but she was blacked out hard at this point and her ego had a fairly direct line to her mouth. "Never forget nothin'. Was Stosser's Keening, 'cept I used it on my mind 'stead of a knife. Made smarter." She chuckled to herself. "Smarter'n these jokers. Smarter'n you. Smarter'n..." Linduin waited, hoping he'd hear who else she considered herself smarter than, but the final word simply came out as a snore.

Linduin carefully cleaned up the mess, had the bottle and glasses taken away, and very politely asked the bellhop for some paper and a writing utensil. Shutting himself away in the room's privy, he began to carefully record all the key terms he had purloined from his inebriate instructor. Somewhere very far in the back of his mind, a small epiphany began to dawn; it was as yet inchoate and unvoiced, but it put down roots in his knowledge of information theory, sent out a few tendrils into his understanding of psychic discipline, and tapped meaningfully in the direction of his woefully inadequate knowledge of sociology. It would take some time, and a significant amount of research, for it to burgeon to the point that Linduin would even become aware of its existence; but that would not occur today.

Slipping back into the room, Linduin conscientiously covered Cheis with a blanket, made certain she was comfortable, and filched a few coins out of the spending money Pellamin had given them. He carefully pondered how long she might remain asleep, then set himself an alarm on his collar for four hours; it was probably extremely conservative, but better safe than sorry. Quietly exiting the hotel room, he headed for the front desk in hopes of directions to a library. A copy of Stosser's Keening, whatever that was, had to be around here somewhere.

***

The forces of the Black Oak streamed eastward, their previous meandering and lackadaisical path now significantly more direct and urgent. Farms, forests, and villages were bowled under and devoured as the horde passed, but they did not linger or even chase escapees. The scouts observing its actions, alarmed, hastened back to the capital; clearly the situation had changed dramatically in some way. Galar Kayle, who had previously been at a bit of a loss as to how to choose the next battlefield, saw an opportunity and moved to sieze it. Giving orders to mobilize the troops and their new accompanying wagons full of militia, he set about preparing for the journey himself. If his luck held, this would be an opportunity that would not come again.

The igg, which had until recently been somewhat fuzzy on the concept of a plan and had mostly been doing whatever it felt like in the general direction of a goal, now strode at the lead of its forces even more urgently than it had on the route to Pols Sedis. It mostly resembled a great mobile castle at this point, with its spire reaching so far into the air that it could be seen for miles in any direction. This was actually quite fortunate for many of the citizens of Temurin, who might otherwise have been unaware of its approach until they were being eaten by its spawn, but its great height coupled with the fact that the spidery gold thread wrapped around the tip of its spire and the metal box mounted at the apex thereof caught the light quite arrestingly made it difficult to miss. The igg, however, cared very little; the humans had been a fun distraction, but its objective now was singularly more exciting to it. The active node it had sensed was still so distant that it could only occasionally catch feeble signals once every few hours, but that was more than enough for a heading. It wasn't actually entirely certain what it was going to do when it got there -- prospection and abstraction not being its best cognitive skills -- but whatever it was, it was sure to be stimulating. It grabbed a cow which had failed to get out of the way with one of its vast, thrashing tentacles and stuffed it into one of its innumerable toothy maws, chewing contemplatively.

Roughly a mile to the south, the village of Veraleigh watched the passage of the horde cautiously but with stoicism; they had seen worse things. One particularly free-ranging oakspawn did in fact come in contact with one of the outer buildings, but was exterminated swiftly and expertly by Rolym the blacksmith, who had a very nice enchanted hammer that had been a gift from Cheis some years ago which forged swords and crushed skulls with equal facility. This was not remotely the least of the reasons why the villagers worked extremely hard to keep Cheis comfortable and happy when she was at home, but it was definitely among them. Having a powerful sorcerer around was handy in lots of ways, after all; and if nothing else, it certainly beat having an angry necromancer devastate your town by a significant margin.

***

Although the initial containment cordon of the imbrication had been largely effective (being powered was it was by fifteen mages concentrating their strength on a convocate casting of Helsaur's Circumferential Holding), there had been a certain rather chaotic period between the initial outbreak and the city's response, swift though it had been. Many of the extradimensional phenomena which had escaped had not been well-suited to existence on the material plane; nearly a third had dissipated or perished within the first hour for various reasons of incompatible metaphysics, and more than half of those which remained, while at least theoretically capable of sustained reification, lacked either the required knowledge to acquire it or the correct sort of thought processes necessary for the constituent actions (if they were capable of thought at all). As a result, despite the rather sizable nature of the outbreak, only a few dozen presences had actually managed to survive this long, and several of those (mainly hantu or other intangibles) had fled the city entirely. Those which had actually made the transition to full exoforms had mostly ended up in biologically infeasible configurations, and had expired on their own after persistent and increasingly desperate attempts to survive in a world that was deeply inhospitable to their new forms. Occasionally this was due to destruction at the hands of humans or other exoforms, but primarily it was the result of incompatible metabolisms; it is difficult, for example, to survive long in a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere when the particular respiration system you have cobbled together requires, say, potassium chloride.

By the end of the first week, only a dozen or so remained, virtually all of them having settled into forms which the scholars of the realms had identified as more stable configurations; a few danava, which mostly kept to themselves and fed off occluded heat sources, a zombie or two that had escaped the initial purge, and a handful of one-offs of rather more exotic design. The most powerful of these was a vanoille that had gotten quite good at pretending to be human during nocturnal hours, had learned enough language to tempt passers-by into dark alleys for a quiet feasting, and was beginning to get interested in fashion; but it was by no means the only one discovering the potential of humans and their complex world of chemicals and solidity. One particular demon had managed to construct a unique form of an ambulatory human head atop a spider-like body, discovered a talent for spinning wires from copper and other metals, and was constructing a rather intricate web with interesting magnetic and harmonic properties in an abandoned factory; it derived its sustenance from mineral forms and found humans mostly terrifying and disruptive, and as a result would survive for quite some time past the end of our story. Many years later, an exploring youth would discover its million-strand web and be quite mystified indeed.

But none of these were cause for particular concern; left to her own devices, Cheis would have hunted them down and methodically expunged them over the course of the next few weeks. Unfortunately, one of the surviving exoforms was a rakshasi, which had a rather more compatible sentience than most of the misbegotten schemata which now inherited Ciel-Upon-The-Sea; it called itself Nyoque, which translated into "Laughing Dark" in the Staptoq tongue, because rakshasi were nothing if not theatrical. It had had nearly two weeks at this point to establish itself, which was a very long time indeed for one of these creatures, and was already aware of Cheis's arrival (it had, in fact, been seated at the table next to her in the restaurant and had taken great pains to observe her undetected since). One of its first meals had been a young scholar of thaumatology, which had given it highly useful intelligence with which to make decisions regarding the city's spellcasting infrastructure and the threats posed thereby, so it did not attack foolishly or prematurely. Instead, it bided its time, concentrated on extending its already-formidable sphere of influence, and sent one of its thralls to follow her apprentice.

Back in the financial district, Umbria DaMoure gave Pellamin a massage. His shoulders, always stiff from hunching over books, had not dealt well with the accommodations of the stagecoach and the ship's berth, and he was now in sufficient pain as to be distracting; but Umbria, in addition to her other talents, was an excellent masseuse, and Pellamin fell asleep rapidly under her ministrations. Afterwards, she awakened him for therapy of a different variety; and Cheis of Veraleigh, unconscious on a couch in her hotel room, threw up.