It was decided that Jero would be sent back to the Guild, along with the sleeping mbers of his party. The Guildmaster would personally debrief them later, once the paladin and his team had a little more ti to absorb what had happened to them. Sev understood this to an that the Guildmaster would stand in the corner of the room and stare at them under the full effects of her anti-perception Skills for a solid few hours, making sure that no one was reapplying any geases.
But she would also be making sure that they were okay, and understood the depths of what they had gotten themselves into. There was a good chance the team would split, she said, but the Guild would provide them with all the resources they needed to continue adventuring if they wanted to, including Guild-mandated therapy.
For that to work, though, Histre had to be separated from the party. Jero had protested this a little, but it was a halfhearted sort of protest; remnants of the part of the geas that urged him to trust the angel, perhaps. Derivan's ability to partially circumvent the Guildmaster's skills ca in useful here he could warn them if the angel seed to be using a skill of so sort.
These were all largely just precautions that they were taking because it made sense to take them. Jero seed genuinely apologetic for all that he'd done (and was getting moreso by the minute, as he processed more and more the extent of what the geas had done to him), and Histre seed... appropriately chastised.
Mostly, this ant that the angel was floating listlessly around the room, like they weren't quite sure what to do with themselves.
"Are you... doing okay?" Sev asked after a mont, a little awkwardly. He'd never spoken to an angel before.
"Yes. No. I am between." Histre paused, like they were considering saying sothing more, but didn't continue.
"Do you know if Aurum is... upset?" Sev asked cautiously.
"He is calling ." The angel swirled, perhaps a little guiltily again. "...He has been calling on for a while. But he needed protection. I did not go."
"Oh my god," Sev groaned.
"I think maybe you should answer that call," Max said, raising an eyebrow at the angel. Histre shifted, a little agitated, golden cylinders clanging haphazardly against one another.
"Jero," the angel said in protest. "I failed him. He needs"
"He doesn't," Max said, but she said it as gently as she could; her eyes searched as if to find a place where she could pat the angel on the shoulder, but she ended up settling for awkwardly patting a wing instead. "He'll be fine. The Guild will handle making sure he's okay. You made a mistake, and that's okay too. Co back when you understand us mortals a little bit more, and we'll throw you a party, okay?"
"Aurum might be calling you because he needs you," Sev added, quietly. At that, Histre froze.
"Tell Jero. I am sorry," Histre said.
Max would later explain that what Histre perford then was a planeshift the exact sa kind that brought people from Earth over into Obreve, though those shifts often happened out in the wild, where few people were around to observe it. Angels and demons, it seed, traveled in much the sa way, except whatever kind of planeshift they were doing required vastly more energy.
Which was probably why it made all of them stagger backwards. Max and to a lesser extent, Derivan were the only ones that seed relatively immune to the cracks in reality that slamd outwards; ripped into the air was pure and utter void, then an impossible, radiating light, then glittering gold
And then Histre was gone.
Sev breathed out, slowly. Max just sighed.
"That's that for a while," she said softly. "Gods almost never send down angels like that. It takes too much energy, and calling them back takes almost as much. He won't be able to do that again anyti soon, and by that ti..."
"He must've been desperate," Sev said quietly. "Probably still is."
"I feel bad for him," Max agreed. "But... it doesn't change the fact that he went around putting geases on people. And what Histre did here is one thing, but all the other individuals with so form of geas on them... It's going to take him a lot of ti to win back any trust. And if you're right, he doesn't have much ti left at all."
"People are dangerous, pressed into a corner," Sev mused quietly. "And I guess gods are people too, here."
"In light of all this..." Max frowned. "I'm tempted to get the Guildmaster to push for more Guild involvent in this dungeon. But you four might really be our best bet on finding out what's in there, and why Aurum was so interested."
"I think..." Sev paused, then groaned. "No, wait, you're right. All the gods are interested. That's why I was bombarded with all those clerics when I went to the temple they're all worried about sothing. Why is this happening now?"
"That," Max said. "Is a good question. When you find out, please let the rest of us know, too."
"That's if we can," Sev muttered, glancing at his companions. All of them wore severe expressions. "Okay. First we get so rest, but then we need to finally get into that dungeon."
Everyone nodded. And then Derivan paused, a little awkwardly, and stared at his screen.
"So," he said. "It seems four was not the limit on my stats. I now have sothing called... Shift?"
Everyone groaned.
Shift, they decided, was sothing they'd have to figure out later. The dungeon was their main priority right now, and 'shift' was vague enough that there was very little they could do to test the stat; the obvious correlation was that it was related to whatever Histre had done to shift back between planes, but that was the limit of the guesses they had.
Derivan could not, for instance, shift himself between planes. Perhaps because the stat was so low, but Max seed convinced that it wouldn't give him control of planeshifting in and of itself; that skill, she said, was completely outside the system.
But if the dungeon had answers, then maybe it would have answers for this, too. So it was decided that that would be their next destination.
They imdiately ran into a problem.
"The first delve team is already in the dungeon," the guard inford them. They'd approached the Elyran camp that was set up just outside the newly-ford dungeon, and stopped just before entering good thing, too, since the errors when trying to enter a dungeon that already had people in it were... unpleasant. "It's closed until they're out."
"You've gotta be fucking kidding ," Misa groaned. "I want to get into this damn place already. Can't you get them out or sothing?"
"That's not my call," the guard said sowhat apologetically. To his credit, he seed like he was being genuine. "You're gonna have to talk to the research lead. He's a bit further in camp. He's pretty friendly, though, so he might help you out?"
"He'd better," Misa grumbled, and the guard looked abruptly pretty worried, especially given the way she was fingering the mace on her belt. Sev snorted, leaning in to stage-whisper to him.
"Don't worry. She's just grumpy. She wouldn't actually hurt a fly," he said, winking. The guard swallowed once, watching Misa.
"Except that ti she did hurt a fly," Vex mused to himself. "But it was a big one and it was trying to eat . So I think that's fair."
"I do not think that is helping," Derivan comnted, his voice tinged with amusent.
"Misa, leave the poor man alone and let's go find the guy he's talking about," Sev chuckled. She was putting on a bit of a show, he knew she had a tendency to do that whenever the team was feeling low, leaning into an archetype so that the people that really knew her would smile, just a little bit. For all that she pretended at gruffness, she had a good head on her shoulders for understanding the people around her.
And so, when they turned to leave, Misa turned around and gave the guard a friendly wave. "Thanks for the help!" she called back.
The poor guard just blinked in confusion.
Thankfully, the way the research camp was set up, it didn't actually take very long for them to figure out who the research lead was. There was a massive control center set up in the middle of the camp, with stone structures jutting out of the ground to act as a physical back for [Scry] screens. On every screen were different angles of what Sev assud was the delve team; four individuals, led by a human captain that seed to specialize in lee. Five total.
"This... is a hell of a setup," he muttered. "Is this how Elyra does dungeon delves?"
"Elyra's interested in figuring out what makes dungeons tick, so they use a lot of analytical tools and spells to understand the inner workings of a dungeon," Vex answered. He seed at least a little distracted, and his tail swung around anxiously. "Normally scrying spells have trouble penetrating into the dungeons in the first place that's why we send scouts. But Elyra figured out a way to anchor scrying spells to their delvers, and now we've got this setup..."
The researchers were muttering to themselves about spatial compression and dungeon geotry. Below every scrying screen, Sev noticed, were knobs and dials that seed related to...
... he had no idea. This was Vex's area of expertise. All he saw were knobs and dials, which he hadn't actually expected to see anywhere in this world to begin with.
"What is the point of the stone?" Derivan asked curiously.
"Light bleeds through the kind of illusory spells we use for this," Vex said with a shrug. "Actual full illusion spells are more costly. Stone is an easy cast-and-forget, and then cheap illusion spells let us see what's going on without expending too much mana."
"You sure know a lot about us!" Soone called down to them had he heard them? He wasn't anywhere near them. The person in question was a lizardkin that wore glasses and what was clearly a labcoat, though why he was wearing a labcoat at all when everyone else was dressed in more practical field attire was a different question entirely. "Wanna co up here and introduce yourselves?"
"Uh," Sev said, staring at the platform that the lizardkin was standing on.
It was a giant, very tall stone platform.
With no steps.
"...Yes?" Sev tried.
The person who was obviously the research lead grinned at them, waved a hand, and there was a vague feeling of consent, like a spell was asking to lift them up and he had to say yes. But he did, and evidently the rest of his teammates did too, because they all found themselves carried up onto the platform and deposited rather unceremoniously on the floor.
The researcher grinned at them. "I'm Kestel. Head of research. You're the adventuring team from the Guild, right? I hear one of the teams pulled back, but they didn't really tell us why."
"It's kind of complicated," Sev deadpanned.
"As long as we keep the food aid deals, we're not really worried about it," Kestel said with a shrug. Sev exchanged glances with the rest of his team; as far as he knew, the Guild was handling that now. The reveal that geases were involved had complicated things, but not as much as they'd expected; as much as people were angry about their geases, they were also grateful for them being removed. "We just started a delve, so there isn't actually much for you to do right now, but we can put you in for the next one. You wanna stick around and watch? We could always use so adventurer feedback, and this will give you a sense of what the dungeon is like before you go in."
"I'd rather be in the dungeon," Misa muttered, but her eyes were already tracking the images on the scrying screens.
Vex, Derivan, and Sev settled in to watch, too.
It wasn't long before they noticed sothing was wrong.
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