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 hops over the wall, still not looking into the garden.