The sun was just reaching its zenith on the fourth day of Cheis's visit to Ciel-Upon-The-Sea when Nyoque arrived at its destination. To an outside observer, the place was a bit of a dump; trash piles and discarded clothes were scattered about in a seemingly random distribution, and all manner of junk was arranged against the walls of the nearby buildings. This spot, where a series of alleys dead-ended up against the rear of a clothing shop, was hardly the place that one would expect to find anyone of import, so it looked a bit odd when Nyoque spread out a colorful rug and prostrated itself in front of one of the junk piles. "Great one. I come to you, showing you the proper respect, and request an audience."

The particular piece of clutter that Nyoque was addressing was a bundle of iron rods, clearly set aside for some future purpose and propped up against the wall of one of the buildings. A keen observer, of which there were none and would never be for long in this alleyway, might have detected a few strange things about it; the curious detail that nothing was binding the rods together, for one thing, as well as the fact that all of the rods seemed to be joined to each other by some eye-twisting escherian topology. The iron rods, as one might expect, did not reply.

Nyoque was undeterred. "I know that my presumption in coming to you is great. I can only hope that my gift pleases you." Out of its pockets, it procured Cheis's enchanted anklet and placed it carefully on the rug, then bowed its head until its face was flush against the ground.

The vanoille, whose powers were at their weakest in the daylight, bestirred itself with great reluctance. A cloud of dark un-light spread out from the iron rods as they began to unfold themselves, seeming to make a bit of a mess out of their localized spatial coherency as they formed impossible knots, strange loops, and other deeply improbable conformations before settling into a sort of brain-meltingly complicated stick-figure shape. A glum-sounding voice boomed forth from it, modulated from air currents coerced into specific patterns by thaumaturgical power. "SPEAK."

"I am Nyoque, and I am your humble servant. I merely bring myself to you along with this trinket, which I hope will prove satisfying to you." Nyoque kept its face firmly pressed into the rug, which both had the objective of showing the proper deference to the vanoille and hiding its maniacal grin.

The vanoille pondered for a moment, then levitated the anklet into itself and consumed it. Seated in a cafe across town, Cheis got an alert and groaned in annoyance as she had to expend nearly half of her remaining power reserves to formalize her virtual copy into a self-sustaining physical object. She then kicked herself for not tracking it while it had still been in existence.

Arcane power flooded through the vanoille, providing it with tremendous nourishment and knowledge as it teased apart the supporting strictures for the anklet's enhancements. It poked curiously at some of the metaphysical structures, marveling at the ideas they contained -- ideas such as "blood" and "tensile strength" were fairly foreign to it. It focused its attention on Nyoque once more. "GIFT TASTY", it commented.

Nyoque huddled further down into the rug, grinning wider. "I am overjoyed that my meager offering meets with your approval, great one. Forgive my presumption, but would you desire more of such feastings?"

The vanoille, though possessed of sufficient magical power that most of its ilk were worshipped as gods by the unfortunate humans who crossed their paths, was nevertheless not terribly bright by the standards of anthropic thought. "MORE TASTY", it demanded.

"As you desire, great one, of course! I shall see to it at once." Nyoque scooted backwards on the rug. "How shall I address you in the future, that I may show you the greatest proper respect?"

The vanoille, which had absolutely no concept of nominative identity, did not consider its response meaningful in any way. "I VANOILLE." it said dismissively.

Nyoque had to bite its tongue to prevent laughter. "Of course, Lord Ivan Wall. I shall deliver such repasts as you command as soon as I am able. Do you wish me to bring the tributes here, or shall I convey you directly to them?"

The vanoille considered. It feared the rakshasi not at all; even its magic immunity, which the vanoille could sense as clearly as a human could detect color, posed it no difficulty, but there could be complications to relocation. Most importantly, it would lose access to the cast-offs of the clothing store, which to it was totally unacceptable. "BRING HERE", it commanded eventually.

"As you command, great one. I shall begin the preparations immediately." Nyoque kept itself pressed to the ground until it felt the weight of the vanoille's presence dissipate. It looked up, keeping its gaze upon the iron rods as it gathered up the rug, and scampered backwards out of the alley; quantum-locking a dormant vanoille was an important part of not becoming food for such things. As soon as it was out of line of sight, it tossed the rug into a trash pile and shifted forms, making its way back across the city. If everything was going according to plan, the next series of events would be kicking off in a few hours. It wouldn't be getting involved, of course; but nevertheless, it couldn't resist wanting to be present to enjoy the show.

***

The igg enjoyed a leisurely sea voyage for the most part, consuming various aquatic fauna and sampling their genetic codes in much the same way that a gastronomic tourist might indulge in a pub crawl. It tweaked and fussed with its form, experimenting with different new options and discovering how they best worked in various physical mediums. Fins and tails seemed useful in water but less so in air or on land; muscular hydrostats, as usual, seemed the most flexible and aesthetically pleasing to it. One of its largest priorities, of course, was the reacquisition of biomass; it had rather enjoyed being large, and decided that greater self-aggregation was preferable to minions, since it could more personally enjoy interacting with other physical lifeforms. It drifted, thrashed, and swam alternately as it adapted and refined itself, always heading eastward towards the steadily-strengthening signal.

It was nearly halfway to its destination when it encountered its first companion sailing vessel: a merchantman on its way out from Ciel-Upon-The-Sea bound for Tarbuse with a heavy cargo of silks and wines. The igg examined it curiously, at first thinking it to be a new sort of life-form, but eventually spotted the humans running about shrieking on its topmost surface and realized that it was some sort of mobile, liquid-buoyant dwelling. It was so excited to see humans again that it gazed upon them with an enormous, lidless eye for nearly ten minutes before getting a harpoon directly in its face-analogue, which rather disrupted its mood.

When the exchange of cultural values had ceased, the ship was in pieces, its crew was being grabbed up by the igg's many tentacles and stuffed into its myriad maws, and its cargo was on its way to the bottom of the sea along with its owner's profit margins. The next two ships did not fare any better.

***

Linduin stood outside the large building, double-checking his notes. His instructions to himself, for lack of a better word, had been complex and abstruse; he had written and mailed a number of cryptic letters, broken into a few houses and stolen some diaries and jewelry, and had had one extremely incomprehensible interaction with a man with whom he had exchanged some gold, gotten a bag of powder, then punched the man in the face and yelled out "Vixman sends his regards", which presumably made sense to someone other than him. The contents of the letters and diaries, which he had read but not understood, were presumably being aggregated somewhere else in his brain; he performed a thoughtspeeding every few hours, each time receiving a new script of successive actions to take. Each was more inscrutable than the last, but he wasn't concerned; if you couldn't trust yourself, after all, who could you trust?

The spells he'd apparently designed for himself, while limited variations on a theme, had been extremely handy; a bit of thermal telekinesis to frost a window here, a bit of optic camouflage to slip past a guard there, and a gentler version of the sleep spell to induce the occasional bystander to doze for a moment while he relieved them of their wallet or specified item. This next spell, curiously labeled "Waltz743", would no doubt be equally interesting in action. He confirmed his observations, pocketed his notebook, and kicked in the door to the building's secure access lobby.

As a large number of heavily-armed men swarmed towards him, he activated the spell and noted with interest that his surroundings seemed to dim and slow down while a glowing footprint appeared in his field of vision, superimposed upon the scene in front of him. He carefully stepped into the footprint, and another appeared before it, which he then stepped into in turn. The series of glowing footprints continued in a sort of weaving pattern past several guards, and occasionally other instructions would appear, such as "grab pike", "turn left", and "raise arms over head". He was dimly aware of a large number of events occurring around him, but mostly just focused on his instructions; he had a feeling getting distracted here would be less than ideal.

To the guards responsible for the security checkpoint in question, what appeared to happen was that a young man in a dark green cloak burst through a locked door, leapt deftly past their weapons, and proceeded to butcher or kick the shit out of each one of them in an inhumanly precise and queerly precognitive fashion. He ducked impossibly accurately between two descending swords (causing them each to strike the wielders of their counterparts), drove an elbow into one guardsman's nose while snatching his pike out of the air, and spun about in exactly such a fashion that the pike blade's multiplied force decapitated a third guard, its butt concussed a fourth, and cleared exactly enough space around him that the two crossbow bolts which had been about to strike him sailed neatly under his armpits. When the reinforcements arrived, instead of running or taking a defensive stance, Linduin dropped to the ground, gathered his feet under him, and launched himself backwards directly into their blades.

The guards, initially pleased by this turn of events, quickly found to their chagrin that Linduin's unexpected maneuver had put him in a perfect position to be inside the arcs of their swings. He landed with each foot directly upon the instep of a guard, snatched the swords that they then convusively dropped out of the air, and executed a rather graceful twirling aerial pirouette which neatly severed the heads of all seven of the reinforcement guards. Without looking, he tossed the two swords backwards over his shoulder (just happening to impale the two crossbowmen with extreme precision) and plucked an identification badge off the chest of a gape-mouthed functionary who had been waiting fairly patiently for his turn to be called at the processing station. Ducking smoothly under the turnstile at exactly the correct moment for the last two guards to miss decapitating him and instead accidentally disembowel each other, he hopped over the counter past a terrified secretary and glanced in passing at the floor map laid out for visitors. According to his instructions, he should be heading for office 7A, about seven floors up. He tucked a pre-written note into the secretary's screaming mouth, deftly stepped up onto the handrail of a spiraling staircase, and dashed up the bannister with impossible dexterity.

Behind him, Cheis of Veraleigh stepped through the door, fresh from reaping two zombies and an asura and hoping she wouldn't have to wait long for her appointment. Her expression when she saw the carnage was briefly surprised, but quickly settled into a pose of grim determination. Clearly, the archmage's calendar was going to be very full.