After everything that’s happened, Ursa and Nora go for coffee the day after, to try and process a bit. Ursa is wracking her brains to try and think of rescue plans for Merlin in the pocket dimension, and Nora’s head is spinning with what the fuck to do about mantles in general – can they be stopped at whatever their source is instead of with perception filter fuckery?
They’re approached by Adagio, who would like Merlin’s help in tracking down a monster she can’t find ‘using the computer’, and it’s a bit awkward. She just leaves.
The next day there’s an ad-hoc service at the institute, with Brynner giving eulogies:
‘Cepheus was a rather brilliant man, as I’m sure all who had the privilege of working with him directly would agree. He was devoted to his family, but also to his colleagues; the kind of man who sought in all his actions to make everyone else’s lives that little bit easier. Things will be more difficult and darker without him.’
‘Sam “Merlin” Williams too was rather brilliant. He was somewhat acerbic in that common affect of the truly gifted, but those who got to know him personally knew him as passionate and highly principled. The improvements he made to our systems have allowed us to intercede in masquerade breaches faster and bring the levels of auditor emergences down to levels almost as low as before the invention of the smartphone. The… circumstances of his loss are…’
But it’s interrupted firstly by Ursa shouting ‘don’t you fucking eulogise merlin because he isn’t fucking dead’, and secondly by a guy with a well for a head running in and reporting to Brynner that a necromancer has emerged in Edinburgh.
See, Tim – a scarecrow that’s alive for some reason – has tracked a necromantic trail to Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, and as Brynner explains to Ursa and Nora that they need to port out to Edinburgh to assist him (and a bit of info about necromancy being so dangerous in this setting – specifically imperfect resurrections ALWAYS trigger auditors, and the necromancers themselves trigger auditors for a year and a day after casting. Plus, weaker necromantic anima is bleached away by sunrise, so necromancy is easier at night, vampires style) while all this is being learned, Tim is fighting off an animated body from the 1700s. He drags it back to its upturned grave and casts Daylight to finish it entirely.
Before this, though, he notices the ectoplasmic flesh the old bones are clad in is actually healing somewhat—really advanced spellwork—and then promptly gets into a debate with the bone fairy, who offers him 5,000 british pounds for the bones. He says they’re not his to give, and then she gets chased off by Ursa and Nora arriving.
The two, upon meeting Tim, are very much like ‘what are you though’, and Tim more or less explains that he is a sweet boy who doesn’t have a youtube account. Moving forward, Tim Find Familiars a crow and does a sweep of the kirkyard, and surmises that the Necromancer has gotten what it wants for now and left, and that perhaps it’s testing the limits of its power with older and older remains.
So the plan is to wait until night falls and stakeout the oldest part of the graveyard until then. But before then I believe the plan was to find somewhere nearby for coffee? It’s Caliber baby!!!
Roll History 