Cagliostro et al are guests in a multiple-bodied plant creature's home. Cagliostro sets up a five-mile dome ward around the group, leaves explicit instructions about being woken up, and takes a nap (presumably with one of the sword-sisters also taking turns sleeping). Time passes. Cagliostro awakens, and the sun is still pretty much in the same spot. Cagliostro notices that he awakened himself, and checks the environment. - Mistress Janice is still attempting plantward communication - Gil is sharpening a variety of blades "Three good marches" elapsed. The sister reports that the sun "wobbles" instead of staying straight overhead as a proper sun ought to. This was confirmed by checking measurements. Gil is still feeling blind, but her hands work better. Cagliostro checks - she seems to be returning to her normal shape, but veeeery slooowly. There is a low rumble and what sounds like a cannon shot. Cagliostro wards, then tries to pinpoint the shot - and fails. Cagliostro sets up to listen to the next shot Mistress Janice reports that the plant thought that was unusual. She now realizes she is feeling peckish, so Cagliostro creates a table spread for her. Cagliostro ponders, and recalls some collaboration with that DaVinci fellow. Cagliostro creates transparent spy black helicopters Four directions - wallward, away, this way, that way. Down (if wallward to right) - dead people look bloodlessly dead (or deeply asleep). Dead people look humaniform to many decimal places. There was a projectile stuck in the wall. Cagliostro creates another two t.h. The wall is coated 1 to 1.5 inches in depth, with stone on the inside. The ball is embededded on the inside, with stone and wall bits around it. No damage to the inner skin coat. Cagliostro creates a t.h. with a grappler to retrieve a sample of the outer skin, and leaves a t.h. to monitor the area for response procedures. A piece of the outer wall is brought - it appears to be some sort of plastic polymer, applied liquid (perhaps slathered on, perhaps sprayed on) and then dried. Cagliostro sends the helicopter to Gil with food and drink. Gil is aware of the intrusion. Gil asks for strong drink, but it will take 3-4 gallons of the strongest drink Cagliostro can provide to get her buzzed. Cagliostro sends in a few gallons of that, along with large bags of popcorn, pretzels, and peanuts. Gil reports being buzzed. Gil speaks of Wixerbrau, an alcohol specifically designed to get members of her family drunk. She asks Cagliostro to remind her to give him a glass to Wixerbrau so that he is familiar with its properties should he need to get members of her family drunk. There is another air-shaking whump. Cagliostro loses contact with one of his helicopters searching for the cannon devices. Cagliostro realizes that the helicopter was flying about 9 feet high, and not really built to handle shockwaves well. Cagliostro sends the other helicopter over at a higher level to observe. About a ten square foot area is -exactly like- an adjacent area - optical camoflague. Cagliostro is pretty used to looking at vegetation, so he recognizes the effect. The second cannon shot is four feet from the first one, and an hour later. It seems Cagliostro creates a new helicopter with lots of passive systems and sends it over to the area. The cannon area seems very tent-like, fixed walls and fixed top. The front gives some waver, but not much. Something beating against it. There seems to be sound dampening around the tent. Cagliostro and Mistress Janice open up the gate near the wall. Cagliostro seems to have the hang of it. Cagliostro tries to set up a rubberish physical device to bounce the shell back. The wall has a smell - some sort of toxin. Cagliostro moves the air away. The people on the wall are definitely dead. The plant is not affected. Cagliostro notices a cannister inside the wall spilling the glass out, and deconjures it. It has some amount of mystic inertia. There is a missile firing toward the area - Cagliostro realizes that light is slower than sound here. Cagliostro diverts the rocket upward, and the rocket reconnects. The wallward helicopter stops reporting - nothing, nothing, nothing, BIG TEETH. Cagliostro puts in a 20' floor in the remaining helicopter programming. There is a loud whimpering from that area. Cagliostro creates a new helicopter way away, and sends it to replace the wallward copter. The new t.h. finds a bear/wolf pawing at its mouth and its gullet - the whimpering is louder farther away than closer to it. Time approaches the next boom point. Cagliostro creates an inner force ward then steps back through the gate to observe. The ball is launched - the rumble, whump. The turbulence is very high, even with the helicopter in the sky. It very briefly saw something at the open mouth of the tent. The beast also hears the noise - and runs toward the sound. It seems to be speeding up geometrically, then speeds past the area with the tent and the cannonballs. After a few minutes, an apparently unarmed humaniform individual comes out and pokes the membrane. He pokes the area where the first cannonballs arrived, looks perplexed, and crawls back in the tent. Another hour passed. A new ball fires on the exact same trajectory, doinks off, and gently touches the third ball. There is an earthshattering kaboom, far out of proportion to anything that should have happened short of a ball of plastique. The same guy comes out, sticks a tool in the hole, examines the tool, and crawls back in the hint. The tent is lifted up and carried backwards about 300 feet. The camoflage continues to mimic 20 feet off to the left. This opens up new lines of fires, so Cagliostro presumes a new tactic. Cagliostro starts thinking up a way to create a 15 minutes later, a bright light starts flashing near the tent's area - all in red. A laser, definitely airborne, probably not orbital. Cagliostro hears some sort of unsteady airborne device - which then bursts into flames just after firing a second shot. Whatever caused that was not local - Cagliostro didn't detect anything that caused it. The laser hits the top of the tent, and is reflected 20 feet to the left. Cagliostro realizes parts of the flaming gasball will hit the garden, and pushes wreckage outside of the garden with fortuitious air currents. The sound of the crash reaches Cagliostro before the sight. Ten minutes after finishing the 'stop that' ward, there is a large whine, and a giant propeller-driven missile comes drifting toward the wall. It looks designed to rupture. Cagliostro steps through the gate, deconjures the bolts on the propeller, steps back. The device slows but continues moving, sinking somewhat. The guy comes back from the tent with a sharp stick, and follows the dirigible. Cagliostro adds a few hexanes, and makes it super flammable (after making the dirigible stabproof with an inner lining). The scout stabs the dirigible a few times, uses a hammer to try, then goes back and returns with a hand projectile weapon. The weapon doesn't create a spark, and does create a hole, driving the Cagliostro deconjures the rest of the anti-plant toxin. The guy is thrown out of the tent, and goes back to check out the debris. Whilst poking, the next ball fires from the cannon and strikes the scout - and explodes. Cagliostro notices it explodes when metal contacts metal, and warns the rest of the group. The swordsisters rummage through their packs and produce leather-wrapped sticks. A second missile is fired, pointed in the general vicinity of the tent. Cagliostro examines the missile - the payload is human. The missile appears to be designed to crumple on impact, theoretically preserving the life of the human inside. The missile impacts, it crumples like cardboard (or wet wood) and the human inside survives. She gets out, and starts moving toward the area in question. Cagliostro realizes she looks vaguely familiar - a strong resemblance to the guards killed by VX gas. She scouts the area, does not seem to find the tent. She examines the wall with the balls, works backwards to where the tent was, then scouts around. There is no mark of heavy equipment in the area, just crumpled grass as if walked on and the holes of tent pegs. Cagliostro realizes the hour is almost up - so he works on a gate for her and holds it mostly open waiting for the sound of the shot. The shot fires, she steps toward it - and Cagliostro gates her to him. (All of Mistress Janice's gates are invisible and non-see through.) She boggles, steps back, and the ball has passed through her area in the intervening period. The stop-fast ward works, and the ball is stuck in midair. She looks out, sees the ball, makes a reverent gesture at the sky. She examines a ball, throws a metal dart at the ball, which explodes (but half gets caught in the field). She cries, wails, gnashes teeth, wails, tears her clothes, and collapses in a sobbing heap. She seems closely related to two of the guards on the wall. The hour point approaches after fifteen minutes of concentrated warning. The whistling happens, she drops flat. The ball fires, hits the debris of the first ball, triggering another explosion. After the explosion, the soldier peeks over the wall and throws a dart at the new debris. The dart hits the stop-that field, and sticks. She tries to pull it out, tries harder, ends up swinging from the dart, and hastily swings back off on the other side of the wall. Cagliostro talks to the The soldier gathers the gear and creates a sort of mirrored ball, with the mirrors on the inside, with eight holes carefully punched on the back and one in the front. She puts a crystal in the hole. She fires the eight weapons, and soon a beam appears from the front. (Hey, that's a concentrator for eight beam weapons. Not bad for field work.) She fires the beam weapon at the metal, which melts and runs to the ground. She fires her beam weapon at the space, notices where the beam diverges to the side. She charges the tent. The same guy charges out with a shaking gun. The gun is a compressed air gun - there's a fan that keeps the projectile from touching the barrel. Cagliostro can't figure out the triggering mechanism, so prepares to deconjure the projectile. The soldier notices the gun, steps behind the stop-that field, which protects her. She throws a dart at the guard, which hits him in the eye and he dies noisily, cleanly, and with a dart in his brain. The gun falls to the ground, where it shakes even more. The soldier lights the tent, which fails to burn but sort of smoulders. The grass is green and wet, and also fails to burn. She lights a second side, lights a third side, picks up a stick and waits at the fourth edge of the tent. After a bit, the same man (or perhaps his brother) comes out of the fourth side of the tent and is hit by a stick and collapses. She ties him up, waits a bit longer, and goes back into the tent. She comes out, and climbs back up onto the wall, still not looking into the garden. Hanging from the ceiling in heavily padded leather bags are round objects, presumably metal balls. Nothing -repeat nothing- inside the tent is obviously metallic. Cagliostro checks for booby traps - there is a line of metal darts balanced oh-so-precariously on the back pole. He conjures ice around them to seal them to the pole. After entering, Cagliostro realizes the bags with the metal balls have been engineered to drop when brushed - so he tries not to think about it. Very quickly, Cagliostro realizes his mind is picking up the habit of not looking at the walls. The amazon tugs on the cord near the front, and realizes that with all her strength she can barely budge the cord. Cagliostro decides to examine the cord first (after creating a gate that leads back into the Garden). Neither Cagliostro nor the amazon have ever seen anything like it. It looks like it's one long stable molecule. It's stable, real, and has the same level of mystic intertia as the rest of the place, and it doesn't have any ends. Cagliostro turns to the winch, which has a strange winding mechanism. The top of the winding mechanism is wet. There doesn't seem to be any way to turn the winding mechanism. The hook is held by a cable that looks thicker (without being different) and has ends. Cagliostro decides not to experiment with the weird wet things. There are also some benches, a bucket (for the obvious reason), and a detailed map. The map is of the shots to be made at the wall - the angles and adjustments are for the tent, not the firing mechanism. There is something up near the ceiling of the tent, but it's covered with wall-material and Cagliostro's brain won't go there. The amazon chokes back an excalamation - she saw an eye! right there! Cagliostro asks permission, and checks her memory - brainignoreswall, brainignoreswall, brainignoreswall, BIG EYE!, brainignoreswall. After delivering in-case-of-keeling-over instructions, Cagliostro CONCENTRATES on a piece of the wall material. He will UNDERSTAND it. For a moment, his brain is open to the infinity of the universe. The next thing he sees is open sky, and garden around. He goes off to sleep, the amazon will watch the gate. She reports that he missed the edge of the tent by a hair's breadth. Cagliostro goes off and sleeps. It is a quiet sleep. He awakens to the smell of brewed coffee. Cagliostro is feeling better, and gets rid of the gate. She was contacted on one of the cards, by something that was apparently a hamster. Or a mouse. With coffee. She hands over a small folded bit of paper. There is a picture of a hamster and a note "When your attention is not urgently required None of the helicopters are on-line. Cagliostro decides he doesn't care, and concentrates on the picture of the hamster. The plant Hamster looks more haggard They are in a 2 foot by 2 foot area at the center of a blue aura. The radiation seems to have penetrated Somewhere, in the depths of his mind, Cagliostro realizes: he's seen this before, it was bigger, and it was angry at the time. The hamster is tired, not irradiated. -- Jean talks to Brand. Hamster Caine The air is irradiated, the environment is saturated. Whatever he set off was a bunch of chain nukes. Without a constant supply of mass, the radiation eaters will stop. There is a hamster holding a human-sized cup of coffee. Cagliostro nods, creates the radiation-eaters, and supplies mass. The coffee seems real, and keyed to his metabolism - so it's not only very tasty, it's providing a caffeine lift. Cagliostro comes up with a plan that would create nanomachines that would embed a human and change the radiation into electricity and torture him - two symbiotic nanites. This would take about four or five hours, and Cagliostro puts it on the back burner. Things progress quickly - the pattern is cleansed in heartbeats, and The hamster disappears from Cagliostro's shoulder and appears at the edge of the glowing line. He walks the line, reaches Cagliostro, and does it again. Cagliostro soon reaches the maximum amount he can conjure at a time, and can hold this for up to 35 to 40 hours without rest. He continues creating mass. At 42 hours, Cagliostro is creating mass and nothing is eating it. Caglistro tells the hamster he needs to lie down, which is tricky. The hamster walks the pattern again, disappears, and Cagliostro is called from the call. The hamster draws a very very real sword that seems somewhat connected to the power from the small room, and stands guard. Cagliostro sleeps. Again. Cagliostro wakes normally. The hamster is still standing guard. The hamster has seen nothing, but his powers of observation did not warn him when he was arriving the first time. Cagliostro asks for help making a short side trip to Darkover, and continues creating mass after sending the 'wake up' signal. When the hamster is in communication with people, his personal time seems to slow down. No hitches with the creation. -- Jean works on retooling the factory. Jean remembers that Qrlon is on the missign list. People offer cosmetic suggestions - mauve tanks with red horns. The planet is both flat and waterless, and not terribly deep. It's easy to cover the surface, and there aren't many caverns. The radiation gets trapped in the upper atmosphere. Cagliostro keeps working, that gets cleaned up, space is clear. There must have been several planet-cracking nukes deployed. There is mass being created that isn't being eaten, and things go naturally dormant. Cagliostro could also map this planet in his sleep. Cagliostro talks to Brand - there is no ecosystem now, but there wasn't much of one before - just Jean. Which would explain the massive use of nuclear planetcrackers, opines Cagliostro. -- Jean stays behind, but a spare Jean meets up with Cagliostro in Darkover. Cagliostro is told that he can get to Darkover, but after that Hamster Brand is going to have to hibernate for a while. The hamster pulls out a card, concentrates on it, and holds out a paw. Cagliostro is passed through. He is on top of what looks like the edge of a large sandbox. There is no apparent difference between the sand inside the box and outside the box. Cagliostro talks to the hamster there, which is Hamster Deirdre. Things are unsettled in this particular area, and Hamster Deirdre will be in the area for some time. Cagliostro spreads a handful of breeder nanites around the area. Cagliostro talks to his people, and a dump truck and a front-loader arrive. More dump trucks arrive, and sand is turned into nanites. At the top of the ramp, Cagliostro encounters a lot of hard radiation and marked off areas. Sand is dumped and turned into nanites. There are protestors, who are on the news. About an hour and half into, a capsule with Cagliostro colors is heading near terminal velocity, as if it were the top of a ballistic missile. It doesn't look like the person who designed this had landing in mind. Roland took a wrong turn in the assassin's guild - and was mistaken as an invader, tortured, and broke. Cagliostro communicates with Jodo, who fills him in. There was a grand gathering, Roland is back and is mentally unwell, as well as desperate for Cagliostro's company. Cagliostro gates back to the hamster, and there is no hamster there. Cagliostro creates a helicopter, which stays more than twenty feet up. A black blur smacks down the helicopter, and a black cat the size of a house bounds up the ridge. It regards Cagliostro, and purrs. Cagliostro introduces himself, and asks about Hamster Deirdre. The cat drops a shoulder, Whoever designed the cat really knew how to make something move efficiently through a desert. Eventually they arrive at another black cat, and the first sha'um drops shoulder. Cagliostro dismounts, and the second cat appears. Cagliostro is fitting inside the mouth - barely. "Roland - we may have to make two trips". There is a pressure change. We are standing on a big silver disc with twelve circles - 8 large, 4 small. The cat says "Edge bad" and steps back through. After a moment, the cat return and spits Roland out. Neither Roland nor Cagliostro are able to exit the place through one of the rings that the cat has stepped through. Cagliostro waits for the cat to return, and tries Mistress Janice's card. The card is warm, not cold. The cat returns with someone else scruffed, and the new person is spat onto the ring with considerably less gentleness. The new individual is wearing brightly colored motley, a belled hat (shoes/belt/etc.), and various jester accoutrement. He's belted into another world, and returned - the cows are pastel, the kangaroos are weird. Small gates are tubes, large gates lead to places, mostly unpopulated. All of the places are different, and all of them are wrong. All eight gates are explored. There are definite edges, two and a half lanes wide. Cagliostro creates a vehicle on the ramp (a clockwork car with wheels etc.), which zooms out the other side. The second one is a mad scientist's laboratory, the next one - he does not come back. About fifteen minutes later he returns, reports the presence of a highway. How many gates are there? "Less than there was." How many? "Many paws." Try to nail it down - "Fewer than grains of sand on your world - but not by much." The cat leaves, and returns with a mite. The mite is king of the mites, and descended from those who fought on behalf of Hamster Benedict. The king does know of the hamsterverse gate - Roland knows of the place where metal explodes - but doesn't know how to get there from the outside. We come out halfway up a mountain, and by the time we reach the end the amount of rock and dust and dirt has brought a crowd. Cagliostro says: "Take me to your hamsters." They speak a language -- Jean recognizes the language, it's from the planet with the loaves and the fishes. Cagliostro distracts the crowd ("What is that?!") and gates through to the hamster planet. Brand is curled in a nest, asleep. Roland asks Cagliostro about the squiggle, and Cagliostro only dissembles slightly. Roland announces that he's going to do something stupid, and hands Cagliostro his sword. Roland does a handstand, a fingerstand, and fingerwalks his way through the pattern. Roland pulls Cagliostro through (and up) trying to get him onto the shoulders. The plan is successful. The two of them think of Cagliostro's daughter, and the two of them are in front of Mistress Janice. They arrived on top of the plant's language center, and provided a useful object lesson. Gil is hungry, the sisters have gone off to recon. Cagliostro passes food in to Gil. Roland get datadumped, and is getting more assured. He asks good questions. Gil reports a pressure change earlier, pushing in all directions, that could have been weather, the plant, or the creature in with her. The sword-sisters report that a burial ceremony is happening now, and some saber-rattling between the various factions. It might be more serious, it might not be. "For soldiers, they're very good diplomats." The tent is gone (big squealling falling rock) landed on the tent, just before the funeral. Roland reports that the eye described looks like a roc's eye - but a roc with a head 60' by 60' to have an eye that big.