Joseph
He turns to Larry and winks. The kid’s gonna treat him like he’s some wise old sagely figure regardless of how he acts or what he says so he may as well make the best of it. Funny how that works – the best illusions are the ones folks believe all by themselves. Given that his peculiar art of spellcraft seems to be a genuinely lost art in this IronWorks place it’s not all that surprising the kid looks at him like he was one of those mages he grew up reading about. Well, at least that disposes him to listen and maybe pick up a thing or two.
“You read much, kid?” His question is sudden and he does not bother waiting for an answer. “Important stuff – reading. A guy’s gotta keep up with his discipline if he’s gonna be any good at it. Some guys, they read one book and learn it really well and think it makes ‘em an expert. The guy what made this tower from the look of it is one of those. That’s not to say he did a bad job here – hell, it’s a pretty impressive piece of work. But it’s limited. And y’know, kid, I can understand that, because when you got more power than a guy’ll ever really need at your finger tips, well, why would you bother about the subtle stuff? But when you’re skinny and weak, like me, and you know power ain’t never gonna be your game, that’s another whole ‘nother ballgame. Now where was I? O yeah – limited. This piece of work that we got here is very limited.”
“Sure,” he says, “it’ll keep out an invading army. And sure you can’t just go teleporting or dimension walking in and out of it. But you see, kid, this place is designed so that any flaws in the setup shouldn’t matter because the Big Guy’s gonna be around to squash whoever finds a way inside, Understandable and even effective in its own way, but sloppy, kid, very sloppy, because you gotta account for a situation like we got here where the big guy ain’t home and guys like us come calling.” Noting Senora out of the corner of his eye he adds, “Sorry about that – guys and lady.”
“Lucky for us though,” he continues, “because if the big fella was here our getting inside probably wouldn’t amount to much except our getting dead. Speaking of which it’s gonna be dark inside and there’s probably gonna be all kinds a critters that the normal stuff you bash a bad guy over the head with won’t be real effective against. At any rate we got two other things working in our favor here – we got weave magic as the underlying system what holds this place together and, you’re not gonna believe this but I’m telling you it’s true, we’ve got a flawed architecture of shadow here. And those two things along with a little bit of work should be enough to get us inside.”
[ 08-24-2005, 01:30 PM: Message edited by: Cyril Darkcloud ]
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