The fight begins with Emva chucking a potion in Merlin’s face, but unfortunately it’s just a potion of lying from Ediera, and doesn’t so anything. Cepheus hits him with his horns, sending Merlin flying backwards. Ursa tries to talk Cepheus out of it, but he insists that it’s his job in a crisis to do anything he can. And this is him doing his job. Ursa tries, then, to put the two to sleep and remove them as a threat without doing harm. Emva falls asleep, Cepheus does not.
Merlin lands and positions himself to hit both Cepheus and the sleeping Emva with a massive lightning bolt. Cepheus tries to shield his wife and so the bolt blows a hole through his chest. Emva, too, is killed.
Using the fallen computer console, Merlin heads into the next room, which turns out to be the server room at the institute. Before Ursa and Nora follow, Ursa tries but fails to stop him with Hold Person, but Nora grabs her and tries to console her at least a little. They hug, and Ursa doesn’t even make a comment about friendship.
Penelope is hiding invisibly in the corner, and Ursa warns her about Merlin’s threat. Merlin looks through a computer here, and finds that there’s no set route for creatures, and that the security can’t be reset unless Brynner gives the all-clear. Also that a clockwork-man like Brynner can come and go as he pleases without being ported, since the security spell is woven around him.
‘Jesus Merlin,’ says Nora. ‘Ella fought against her mantle harder than this, and she’s a human. What happened to the Merlin we knew?’
‘You’re looking at him,’ says Merlin.
At this point, Nora decides since the amount of magic Merlin’s able to put out is way too much to deal with, she wonders if they can lure someone in that might be able to even the scales. It sucks, but she tries to reconnect to Morris. With Ursa’s help, she succeeds in re-manifesting the silver wire linking her to the Morris server. It’s pointing straight downwards.
She travels down the line. There, in the basement Merlin has been instructed to reach, is a massive vault door covered in runes and seals, as well as a figure wearing a trenchcoat and a hat that says ‘NORMAL HUMAN’. Morris is here, wearing a machine body given to him by Lopodite, the Tenth Muse. He peacocks a little and calls himself a new man, implies that he and Lopodite are in a relationship, and talks about being perfectly made to bypass the security in the Institute like Brynner does, barely listening to Nora until she mentions that Merlin’s giving them some trouble upstairs.
‘Ugh, that gnome’s still like that?’ says Morris. ‘So glad I got this shiny body instead of having to use his. Sloppy seconds, you know?’
But he sees an opportunity to show off a little more. He says he’ll meet Nora back up there. He fucking winks.
Upstairs, Merlin has sensed the new connection with his Remote Access, and tries to go for Nora and the cable in her chest – but Ursa stops him, and tackles him to the ground. Nora comes back, and drags Ursa out of the way as Morris comes up in the lift.
‘Merlin,’ he says. ‘You look even smaller in the flesh!’ And casts Meteor Swarm, crushing Merlin like a can of pop.
Ursa leaps and interposes herself again as Morris advances, as she always always does. She tells him that he’s definitely being used by Lopodite (which is true), and that the relationship with her is all in his head. When he protests that he’s better with her than he was with Nora, Nora makes her own little comment about sloppy seconds.
Morris tells Ursa to move, threatening her with a BLADE OF DISASTER, but when she won’t, he says ‘You know what? I’m going to be the bigger man here.’ To Nora, he says ‘Nora, I’m not going to let you hurt me anymore’ and cuts a hole in the floor with his Blade.
As he moves, though, Nora blurts out ‘I wish the Morris Server would die.’ She casts using the server itself, and the server suffers a malfunction. Morris drops through the floor. Nobody’s sure what happened.
Merlin, though, picks himself up at 1 hit point, and after Ursa just about manages to get a quick heal on him, drops down the hole.
As Nora and Ursa debate how to follow, the lift pings again, and Director Brynner appears. It seems Penelope told him what was going on. He says it’s imperative that they don’t let Merlin or Morris get what’s in that vault, but he can either use some power to tell them what’s in it, or use some power to help them in the potential battle. Not both. So they go without learning what’s in there, only that opening it would lead to a “Class-C end-of-world scenario”. He reveals to them that Emva survived thanks to her prophecy, and was ejected from Morta’s mirrors. Cepeheus, though, was not.
He also explains a little about the power Nora has – that it’s specifically a counter to Earth’s immune system, a sort of evasion mechanism for the pathogen that is magic. The weapon created by Nora’s power is specifically forged to destroy mantles – preferably Auditors, but the mechanics are the same for any of them.
‘So we have to kill Merlin, then?’ says Nora.
‘It seems we are left with few alternatives,’ says Brynner.
‘But wait,’ says Ursa. ‘What if… the mantle isn’t trying to breach the vault? It appeared as we were under attack from Morris – what if it’s taken over Merlin to stop Morris and Lopodite?’
Down by the vault, Merlin is launching spells at Morris, who is sneering and counterspelling all of them. The Wish has hit him hard, though the malfunction seems to have hit just as badly. He looks like a fucking mess, sparks and oil coming off him.
‘Seriously Merlin,’ says Morris, as Merlin launches more first level spells for him to counter. ‘You know the definition of insanity, right? Do you seriously think you’re going to hit me with this weak shit?’
‘They may have been weak,’ says Merlin, ‘But not without purpose.’ And as the Mantle restores his spell slots as he uses the last one up (through the restocking mechanic it grants), he does a negative energy flood that does a hundred fucking damage to Morris. The others land at this point, and Morris has begun ranting about getting the content of the vault destroyed, and taking the fingerbone he took from the server room back to Lopodite, and getting his body fixed. He begins peeling away at the vault’s protections, while casting a prismatic wall to keep them out. But Merlin, through magical studies and the mantle of Order, is able to talk them through the methods of breaching each layer. He’s acting a little more like himself, but the cracks are much much worse and he might be running out of time.
They breach the wall. Morris leaves whatever mechanical thing he’s created burrowing into the vault door, and turns to face them.
Roll History 