20 December 2018
Yfer went to Mother’s cave (where her hoard was kept) and confirmed that she alone was inside. She explained that the entrance was concealed inside a cliff face via an illusion.
We hid outside the cave and lured Mother out with the sound of the bell. She emerged, clearly annoyed, and began shuffling up the mountain. Once we were satisfied that she was far away, we snuck inside and found a small cave made up in crude imitation of a study: pots and amphorae, an illusory fireplace, bits of shell made to look like curios and objets d’art.
We took Mother’s books, folios and ‘wands’, left behind our own Wand of Mending to alert Grandmother to her actions, then slipped out of the cave and set the fireworks to go off. Xiao led the party as carefully as possible through the undergrowth, before Yfer appeared and helped guide us more capably back to her nest.
From there, we heard the sounds of the fireworks matched by the lightning, soon joined by the sounds of angry shouting.
While we waited for Yfer to return and report what had happened, we went through the wands and books we’d recovered. Xiao identified 28 separate wands, all with low level spells and few remaining charges; it was clear that Mother liked to cast spells that produced visible magical effects. Aryem, meanwhile, found shipping charts and manifests related to various - sometimes quite exotic - regions. The magical text had been written by all manner of authors, some of whom were clearly used to long-form magical notation and some of whom were clearly not.
Passages included mundane chronicles of the people’ lives, alongside myths and legends and other odds and ends of history that had aggressively been crossed out. Mother clearly wanted to hear simple stories of people, not grand and exciting tales far removed from their lives.