Alrighty… looks like Gerlfi’s in. He made quite a show of it, by all accounts, too. Daylight robbery is pretty bold, as is using Titania and my sprigs to do the heist. It makes me wish Toja’s safe was made of wood. That’d make things a lot easier. So would my sprigs being metal, probably.

But that’s not an option, or at least not an option I’ll have ready in time, if ever, so no sense dwelling on it. I need to make sure I’m as ready as I can be with what I have right now, and honestly, I’m pretty confident. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get complacent.

Teemo and Queen are already working on quietly digging the access tunnel, and I don’t really have anything to suggest to them. What kind of crazy person tries to tell an ant how to dig? While they work, Thing’s going over the books we have on warding, looking for the best way to sneak around or through them. Just dispelling them is usually a bad idea, because a lot of them come with an alarm of some variety, with the really paranoid ones being trapped to either kill whoever broke it or destroy whatever was being protected. Or both.

So sneaking through is the best bet. Wards are of course designed to thwart that sort of thing, but security and infiltration is a never-ending arms race, and if a thief is patient enough, there’s not a whole lot even the best warding can do. In the end, I think it comes down to knowing what the ward is looking for and what it’s blind to, and using that to get through. There’s probably a kind of omni-ward out there somewhere, but the price for something like that would be nuts, especially when there are definitely thieves who will take something like that as a challenge.

That’s why I like my obscurity security so much, and Toja seems to, as well: the only safe that will never be cracked is one nobody knows is there. Anyway, what I understand from looking over Thing’s shoulder… wrist? From reading along with him, I think our best bet will be for him to carefully nudge a few runes around to give Queen room to bore an ant hole through, with Teemo enlarging the space to fit whatever we want through. I think he could technically shrink the outside dimensions of the hole to let us sneak it in easier, while also expanding the interior diameter of the hole, but that seems really hard. Still, it could be some good practice for him. Later. When there’s no lives on the line.

If everything goes to plan, we’ll have our evidence and we can turn everything over without anyone having to roll for initiative. But no plan survives contact with the enemy. If things go pear-shaped, I need contingencies. The worst case scenario is that we don’t get anything and have to take the direct approach. The worst case isn’t one I’m willing to entertain, but the response for that would basically be the same anyway: flip the table, punch faces, shrug and apologize after.

So how are my face-punchers doing? The most obvious one is starting to feel pretty comfortable with gravity affinity. Rocky has a few fun tricks with gravity now. First is what I like to call the tumble-drier, and it might be my favorite for how effective it is. It costs hardly any mana to create a small little pulsating gravity well, hardly strong enough to move around a leaf. But gravity doesn’t care much about corporeal barriers, so Rocky can just put it right inside something’s head.

No, it doesn’t scramble someone’s brain. That’d be… horrifying, honestly. But what it does

do is utterly annihilate someone’s equilibrium, like just tossing someone’s inner ear into a tumble-drier, hence why I call it that. I bet it’ll make people lose their lunch a lot, too, come to think of it. Maybe the Technicolor Yawn would be a better name for it. Either way, it’s the sort of nonlethal trick that I want to teach to everyone, once we have time.

The other trick is that he’s starting to use little bursts of gravity to help pull a foe into his punches, really helping even a quick jab pack a wallop. Olander’s gonna have his work cut out for him in the rematch. I can feel Rocky teasing against the concepts for space and time, too, but he’s resisting the temptation to expand into them just yet. I’m not really surprised he can feel them. Teemo got to gravity from space, so of course the Affinity Savant can go the other direction. I think he’s holding back so he can really look into those affinities in depth once things have settled down a bit more.

He’s not my only scion who’s up for a fight, either. Fluffles has been working with his own practice relentlessly, with him and Rocky constantly sparring and comparing notes. I think Fluffles is closer to gaining time affinity than Rocky, but just like the boxer, my wingnoodle wants to master what he has before he goes adding more things to his box of tricks.

Gravity plays really nicely with his telekinesis. Sure, he still has to spend kinetic energy to change a foe’s momentum thanks to their mass, but he can effectively negate the pull of gravity now, which lets him get incredibly efficient with it. It’s a bit more expensive if he’s going to just throw things around once, but if he’s going to keep using them, it’s worth it to play with gravity. He gets even more efficient with his air affinity helping along, too. If he wants to, I bet he could get some nice cyclical BRRRT going if something really makes him mad.

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At that point, the limiting factor would be in getting him something he can throw around hard enough to survive the forces. Maybe another project for the nerd squad later.

Even Onyx is doing her best to step up her game. She has a lot fewer options than Rocky and Fluffles when it comes to affinities, but they’re both working with her to let her get the most out of what she has.

I don’t have a great understanding of shadow affinity, so I can’t really offer much advice there. I think shadows are up there with centrifugal force as things that science says technically isn’t a thing, but there’s a few interesting bits I’ve observed, like how shadows seem to be kinda linked. It makes me wonder if quantum stuff is actually in shadow instead of fate affinity. Or maybe that’ll be the link to expand into it. Either way, I barely even have what I would call theories about shadow affinity to offer.

But she also has decay affinity, which has all sorts of fun uses and concepts. While it would be terrifying to start giving her pointers on how to use it as offense, I think the better applications are with defense. Decay and entropy are close pals, and if she can bleed away the strength of any incoming attacks, her shadowy claws are all she’ll need for offense. Even more interesting, when she manages to do it right, even Rocky can’t recover the spent energy. It makes me wonder if she could expand into kinetic or fire by hitching a ride on friction.

She still has a long way to go to stand a chance against Rocky or Fluffles, but the three are great at forcing each other to adapt to surprises in a fight. And they’re not the only ones practicing.

Titania, Leo, and Poe are to large-scale combat what Rocky, Fluffles, and Onyx are to small… though Fluffles can definitely bring some serious scale if he wanted to. I mostly mean in directing forces. Knight-Captain Ross and his troops have been drilling and delving, and with an army to practice against, how could my commanders resist the chance to test their tactics?

The army is having to learn all sorts of new things to deal with the wide range of tactics my commanders can employ, which has been great at knocking the green off of them. At the single-party scale, the army still struggles, but I blame that on my scions having so many options for gathering info that they know how to counter them. But in larger war games, they hold their own so long as we keep things at least a bit fair.

The army has people specialized in earthworks now, the scouts are much better at not only staying hidden, but in spotting my own sneaky denizens, the frontline fighters know how to adjust their defenses to absorb all but the most overwhelming of attacks… I think I might have accidentally introduced special forces to the kingdom. Well… maybe not quite. I think special forces actually would be able to handle my scions at party scale, but that’s only guesswork based off of watching some youtube videos before getting hit by that truck. It’s not like I ever actually met any.

So… yeah, I think the worst case contingencies are handled. As for making sure the best case situation happens, Poppy is helping the living vines practice catching people not only with gravity, but with spatial fun. I have them as my ‘railings’, but if we’re going to make it look like Rezlar fell to his death, we’ll need to make it look like he somehow got beyond their reach, without him actually being out too far.

I think it’ll probably be a better idea to just have a few stationed underneath the tree wherever we decide to set this up, but better to have too many options for safety than not enough. Rose, his familiar, is probably going to be the final line of defense, but hopefully she won’t have to do anything to keep him safe.

Hmm… I need to take some time to plan this out properly. I have a lot of vague ideas, but vague ideas won’t keep Rezlar safe. So, step one: they’re on a branch high up. Easy enough. Step two: Rezlar falls off, out of the reach of some vines. We could try to really fling him, but I don’t know if Pul can pull something like that off. It’d probably be easier to have something happen to the vines somehow… like maybe testing some new spell or alchemy. I know Rhonda loved the freezebang potion Queen made for Vernew that one time. I could have Queen give her a few hints for it, and they can all take them to the branches for testing. They’ll want all the advantages they can get up there, right? Have an encounter, a few potions go over the side, the vines grab and bring them in, killing the vines in the area without them noticing, suddenly the safety net is gone.

Make the encounter with the very dire ravens that would usually be acting as a redundant safety, and now there’s supposedly nothing keeping Rezlar from making a crater down below. At least to outside eyes. I think I’ll have Fluffles himself hiding in a shortcut below to catch Rezlar, and a few more redundancies on top of that, too. The forest is thick enough that I’m sure we can make him vanish behind leaves, vines, and bark.

We can even hide the ‘body’ and let the Earl try to call out my zero deaths as me just hiding corpses. It’d play right into how stupid he thinks I am, and I know he doesn’t buy that particular fact. But that’s fine, it’ll give him a chance to raise a stink, get some official eyes on me, only for Rezlar to redirect them with his sudden appearance.

Yeah, I think I can make that work.