She doesn't recognise that tree.
She's been here before, she's not that far from the estate, this isn't some unknown place. She must've taken a wrong turn, of course, but where? She should probably just try to retrace her steps, Jaol will be incredibly mad at her...
"Seemed to be but I'm not sure we can assume that's not just for convenience."
"Yeah, that makes it tough. Still, can you do a quick first-person perspective walk-through of how to get from the gate to the inner keep? It'll at least be something, and should help me contextualize directional weirdness from the transmissions."
"Well, we should probably come up with patches for all possible holes in this plan. Suppose I arrive there as normal tomorrow. What goes wrong now...?"
Tetsuma dregs up their memories of ways missions can conceivably go Horribly Wrong, adds in what they've learned of local magic, and generates ideas. (Tetsuma has a lot of stories about missions gone wrong.)
...um, yikes. Some of those are. Wow. He's pretty creative but he'd expect those to be... less... probable somehow. Um.
It's very unlikely! Tetsuma's pretty sure their world is just weird. Also, like, the Senju take a lot of missions, so this isn't a big percent of them. Though yeah they also have this one cousin who has the bizarrest luck.
Yes. Definitely. Though who knows what kind of weird this realm can produce...
There's an unusually small number of people moving about in the hallways.
She gets to wait about fifteen minutes before Lingormr emerges from his office. "The study room is a bit of a walk from here," he says, then leads her through a winding, maze-like mess of narrow corridors with thin slits in the walls that Kaede can't see through. At the end is a heavy door flanked by two guards. Lingormr steps up to it, and something happens - the quality of the air changes slightly, and then the door swings open as if of its own accord.
Beyond is a decent-sized room. In the middle is what must be the jewel - a softly glowing ball the size of Kaede's thumbnail, on a string of painted wooden beads. The jewel is held in a light clasp. Kaede can feel it from here; it's like the sensation of Tetsuma flaring their chakra, but more. Like a fire held in a too small a container.
There are workstations about the room, and three of the mages are busy at work.
He steps in as well, and the door swings shut behind them.
"Here is the artifact we discussed. No danger has been observed from handling it, though I would ask you to be careful."
"It's—it's so—ooooh." She walks over to it and hovers, not quite touching the jewel.
The jewel's chakra is more apparent from up close. It's strongly fire-natured, enough that even a non-sensor like Kaede can feel the difference. The feel of the chakra is heavy, though, like anger, and small wisps of flame move within the jewel like whirlpools. There's a faint spiral apparent on the front, now, traced into the surface.
There's a sensation, almost like genjutsu, tugging at Kaede's mind if she looks at the spiral too long.
...almost like genjutsu how, exactly? Is it trying to make her see things, or...
It doesn't really seem to be aimed, there's just something of a familiar fogginess trying to settle over her mind. Like it's trying to hypnotize her. Not very hard, though.
Yeah it's trying to hypnotize her. She can start to faintly hear extremely faint sounds discordant to her surroundings, something like leaves rustling and perhaps a flute.
It's still easy to look away. The jewel doesn't seemed to be interested in doing anything else for now.
Hmm can she use her own genjutsu to—amplify it, somehow? See more of what it's trying to show her, give it more detail, more oomph?
Not really. The jewel doesn't seem to precisely have the right sort of awareness to work genjutsu on. And if Kaede concentrates too hard, the jewel's illusion breaks.
No exactly how genjutsu works. She can interact with her own illusions, and take over or influence the jewel's illusion if she wants, but she can't just straightforwardly make it stronger, short of just duplicating the effects she can already feel on herself.
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