No One Here Would Understand As Well As Me

[here_together]

It's probably harder for most people to stay off the grid than you would think, but when you have unusual enough (and useful enough) talents, there's always someone willing to help you out, in exchange for something only you can give them. (Incentives. Supply and demand. The carrot is so much more useful than the stick--and so much less likely to get you hurt in return.) And their magic (it has to be their magic, even when they're a her instead of a they, otherwise the investiture would just fall apart) is uncommonly useful.

Right now they (definitely a they, right now) are kicking back and relaxing in a little no-tell motel. There's free wifi, at least, and the employee who discretely got them a room in exchange for clearing up a few issues also snuck them some decently filling snacks, so they're pretty much good to go until they decide to do something else. Or something interesting happens.

Comments

[here_together]

[Less that, and more--your world is really hazardous, and we feel like if we could just find the right investitures we could fix it, or at least some of it, but there's still so much we don't know. We had no idea that there's apparently a hellscape directly underneath your flat world or that earthquakes release them or--anything like that.]

[inourhead]

[Oh. Well, there's a hellscape directly under our flat world and earthquakes will spit out a handful of demons but the sinkhole spits out as many as feel like emerging, basically."

[here_together]

[Okay, first question: are there any demons that are people.]

[inourhead]

[No. I don't think so, anyway? There might be demons who were people that just happened to find eating souls the only motivating thing in the world.]

[here_together]

[Then is there any reason that you know of that a mage with sufficiently ridiculous firepower couldn't invade hell and make it cease to be a problem.]

[inourhead]

[...Hell's probably infinite too?]

[here_together]

[Well, even if clearing the whole thing out isn't doable, it might be possible to wipe out the ones close enough to the sinkhole to be an immediate problem and then repair the ground somehow.]

[inourhead]

[Klaonso travel really fast and there's already a lot of them on the surface, but I guess that would help.]

[here_together]

[Is there some pre-existing way to kill those? We were figuring that would be a separate magic problem.]

[inourhead]

[Klaonso? No, nobody knows how to kill them.]

[here_together]

[Okay, so we'll have to figure that out too.]

[inourhead]

[That'd be really nice.]

[here_together]

[Troporting could probably do a fair bit of good here, too, but it doesn't seem to be as diverse as investiture.]

[inourhead]

[Yeah, everybody troports the same way.]

[here_together]

[Granted that any given troporter can probably do more things than any given mage.]

[inourhead]

[Well, if they're good at it. I'm really good.]

[here_together]

[Emily and I are on the high end of mages and whether or not you rate us as more powerful than you, we seem to have considerably narrower spheres of influence.]

[inourhead]

[Yeah, but you can affect things you aren't touching, there's that.]

[here_together]

[True enough.]

[inourhead]

[It'd be so convenient if I could troport at range, like, wow.]

[here_together]

[That does sound impressive.]

[inourhead]

[I wonder if there's a way to get hearts and do the investiture thing with each other like you two did.]

[here_together]

[...I mean...it doesn't really feel like anything until you invest it. For all we know--maybe entering the universe did it, or getting touched by my mind-heart-power. We wouldn't know unless you actually tried and failed to invest it, and even then investiture was tricky for us.]

[inourhead]

[Tricky how?]

[here_together]

[You're not supposed to be able to invest your heart in your own body. Doing it anyway involved convincing ourselves that "no I'm not putting it in my body I'm putting it in her body" long enough for it to work.]