Izabel and her friends meet up at the rendezvous point, a bar called the Slick Duck with connections to the Church of Eidetic Man. Izabel looks basically totally inconspicuous with no ears, several missing teeth, and a polished coffin slung over one shoulder. Marcus and Adam are already present, sitting at a wobbly wooden table and looking fairly beat up. Each warrior has a mug of some frothy drink sitting in front of them, but Izabel is pretty sure Adam just has one for show.

Upon seeing her, her compatriots quietly stand up (or loudly, she has no ears) and join her in heading towards a back room. They swing the gnarled door open and close it behind them. It’s a simple store-room with shelves lining each wall and a rug covering the floor. Izabel shifts the rug aside, revealing a Vimworks diagram - a teleportation circle. Izabel removes the flask of purple liquid she took a swig from earlier, and pours a good helping of the rest into smooth, colored-dust coated grooves in the wood floor. The room is filled with a low hum as the circle comes into working order, and in a moment the three are enveloped in purple light.

For a few moments, they experience no sensation but one similar to falling rapidly or overlooking a terrifying height. When that ends, they regain control of their sensory organs and take in their new surroundings - the familiar dank stone depths of the Church of Eidetic Man’s underground facility. This room specifically is host to several teleportation circles and runic arrays, but there are more, each corresponding to different locations around the city. Through this network the Church runs its various counter-Mausoleum ventures, and responds to the Mausoleum’s moves against them.

The party leaves the teleportation chamber, heading for a lab through winding stone halls. The walls are lit by pleasantly tuned blue Vim lanterns and adorned with various images and scriptures. Izabel places her free hand on a large circular stone block sitting in an indent in the wall, and channels some of her Vim into it. Glowing Vimworks are revealed in the stone as it slides open with a low groan. The trio proceeds to bring their haul into a lab, filled with a handful of scientists, a smattering of technical equipment, and a glowing vat of liquid in the corner, a naked body floating inside.

One of the scientists, a man Izabel knows named Swain, sees her wounds and rushes over, reaching into his robes to procure a shining golden liquid. Izabel takes it wordlessly, uncorks it, and grimaces. This is going to be unpleasant.

Before she takes the plunge, though, she slides the coffin off her shoulder and onto an empty stone table. The scientists quickly set to getting it unlocked, unlatched, and opened, pecking over it like a swarm of crows, or rats maybe. Something clever but diminutive and unimposing, you know? Izabel takes her drink before she can think of another example.

It’s a healing potion. Regenerative. Useful for combatants that are the type to get their teeth rocked, or rip off their own ears. Regrowing skin, muscle, even cartilage, in Izabel’s storied opinion, is never that bad. Weird, tingly, sometimes itchy, but dealable-with. Hearing things is good.

The sensation of new bones being formed and pushing/working their way through soft tissue, however, is agonizingly uncomfortable and fairly painful. Izabel doubles over, hand over her mouth, trying to resist the urge to dig into her gums with her nails. Memories of yanking baby teeth, growing new teeth, losing those teeth in scraps later, and finally regrowing those adult teeth resurface in conjunction with this awful sensation. This sucks, this sucks, this sucks, this sucks she thinks. Newly minted bone rips through gummy flesh - drawing blood - and those tears are subsequently healed by the golden slurry. And then it is done.

I should stop getting punched in the face, she concludes when it is done, straightening up and spitting rudely on the floor. “So?” she says, turning back towards the coffin. The gaggle of scientists and her two friends are looking at her sort-of apprehensively.

“Steward Izabel, it appears we were misl-”

“They PLAYED us, Izabel!” Marcus shouts over meek Swain. “Sorry,” he tells the scientist, a moment later.

“It appears… the procession was a red herring…” Adam Nantan murmurs.

The coffin is empty. Before her friends’ words had sunk in, she had the briefest hope that the body had already been brought to one of the glowing vats of liquid to be preserved and studied, but that hope is dashed against realization. The coffin is empty. Bone dry.

Izabel runs her hand along the inner lining of the coffin, as if some secret compartment will open and reveal an incredibly valuable deceased deity. No such luck.

“So this means…” Adam begins, but Izabel speaks over him, full of inky, angry calm.

“There are several implications here. Several could all be true, and none of them bode well. First, our sources inside the Mausoleum were misled, perhaps intentionally. They could be compromised. The Mausoleum could be planning to purge our spies soon - they could be doing it now.”

“I tremble for them,” says Swain. The meek scientist, true to his words, is nervously wringing his shaking old hands.

“They know the stakes,” says Marcus, solemnly.

“Yes, yes,” Izabel says. “What worries me more is the idea that some greater game is afoot, such that they required a diversion of this scale, risking several important resources to secure some greater bounty.”

“Like the corpse of a God?” Adam asks, drily.

“Yes, but perhaps more. I’m wondering: Why now? Why tip that they know about our spies, or they know there are spies? Why risk so many valuable resources - Maritus, Jarud? My first instinct is to reach beyond the explanation that this is merely a play to secure the corpse of a God by drawing us to a false target. I think this is at the least, a very important dead God. That, or this is some dastardly plot to sabotage the Church from within. Like with a bomb. In a coffin. A bomb coffin.” She looks at Swain expectantly, and then the coffin.

“There is no observable bomb in the coffin. It is possible, though, that there are more subtle and intricate Vimworks inside the wood, or something of that nature. I shall have it examined…” he croaks.

“Thank you, Swain. I’ll consider the rest personally, and brief the Cardinals on my findings.”

Izabel cuts her explanation short, because she has a funny feeling. She bids her comrades a period of rest and retires to her personal quarters.

Izabel the Inescapable, among other things, has a gift for momentous clairvoyance. The ability might be called narrative clairvoyance by some wilder scholars or mystics, but the Church considers that term heresy. She can feel the consequences of events or actions as a sort of weight before they occur, sometimes before the act and usually after the fact. Right now, she has that feeling. The events here today will inspire a long campaign of escalating aftershocks that should stretch far into the future, and by her estimation, far beyond the realm of feasibility. The thought is daunting, just like the impressive weight that is the momentous clairvoyance itself.

Izabel broods alone in her simple quarters until past the toll of midnight, considering her inescapable feeling of impending doom.