Oh, The Pain of it All....

It’s going to be a long walk to Wallants, considering that a spellbolt just punched a huge hole into both our magic carpets if the other magic users didn’t bring spares....

Later

Exotica

I must admit, there are some out there that needs killing, as "hotheaded" as that may sound. In the final analysis, I just wish we could just execute Stryke and be done with it! Would make the going ever so easier, probably, than doing this "hide and seek" routine we've been doing. Hiding out at night, recuperating from these d . . .these flying carpets. Flying low and slow to the tree lines, during daytime avoiding hunter snares...all the while knowing that soon enough that the odds would even and we'd have to fight.

Raises my hackles (literally, being that I'm currently in my humanoid fox mode at the moment, panting still in reaction to the latest battle), but that's what we'd had to do. Not like Stryke (at this stage in this chess game) will oblige me and my friends.

This time we'd been lucky. No (serious) injuries on OUR side (don't ask about the other side) and we lucked out with spare carpets.

No, right now we are licking wounds and deciding on what exactly next to do.

Off to one side both Joan (while breastfeeding the still fussy girl infant who'd been Belboz) and Fertal are telling the rapt Praxithea about matters of the family back on Terra Prime. Given her origins I can understand and sympathize why she'd want to know, really.

Not like how my family had been back on my homeworld, back when I'd been human (and under my father's thumb). . . .

....

The others have bent over backwards to make me and my mother welcome so I'm not shorting them their dues (and my love). Just saying that the only true living biological family I now have is my mother (beloved). A woman who's now, soon we discover, the same biological age as me with her transformation into a demifox woman, might I add.

...

Must say that having my mother now being the same age as me, in a sense is . . . odd . . .

Ah, but nevermind that.

Logic dictates that we do nothing with the only remaining members of the hunting party, who are standing as still as statues, only twitching once in a great while.

Powerful and majestic statues, but still as still as statues who move only when commanded by their mage masters (who are NOW well beyond contact anything short of necromancy).

Artizza, our fiery (but rightful) party leader is going over to the native resident of this world to get some answers. Answers that will dictate what we do next.

Her powers (what later I shall almost morn, because she's been by some measures one of the most powerful magic users in this world) have been stunted in some areas, enhanced in others. In others (like say necromancy) that school of sorcery was now beyond her grasp! But still in the final analysis her transformation into a nature spirit had reduced her total magical resources to something less than what she had as a human being.

Not that she misses it, she'll tell me later much to my surprise.

Must remember what Matrix transformations entail, sometimes. What it can do to a person's outlook, sometimes...

...

1. Still, she'll be a great boon to us for the next part. Questions like this. Free them? Ride them? Or put them out of their misery?

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