The Big Bad Tree (Part I) WHO: Mateo, Juliet, James, Eli, Kaveh, and Faihan WHEN: May 14 (~10 P.M.) WHERE: Central Park SUMMARY: Faihan assembles a team to take on the tree. It does not go as hoped, but they learn more and decisions are made. CW: N/A
The tree had grown to about seven storeys by Saturday afternoon when Faihan left Azúcar for his daily inspection. Now enormous—and yet unseen by regular passersby—it had sprouted leaves in a myriad of colors...and was affecting the local power grid.
With Elpis at a safe distance, Faihan approached the tree. Just looking at it, he could feel it draining magic. That was all, though. He needed to know more. He sang to it, as Badr had sung to the barrier around the tower long ago, but his only answer was a deafening silence and a sense that the tree was draining the energy and vitality from its surrounds (including electricity)...and, then, a chanting—like he'd heard during the film festival. He retreated, tripping and falling, but moving back enough that the sound of the chanting stopped.
He decided to do one more experiment—trying to uproot the tree using a song to summon wind. The tree absorbed his magic, throwing up a barrier and spitting the spell back at him—leaving him scuffed, but otherwise fine. It was then that he decided to text the other Chosen and a few others who might be able to help rid him of the tree.
When Mateo, Eli, Kaveh, James, and Juliet arrived that night, Faihan filled them in on his findings:
If attacked, a barrier formed around the tree, and magical attacks would be fired back at the attacker; Using magic near the tree would cause the tree to devour that magic; Trying to speak to the tree through Song yielded a deafening silence—and then the whispering from the festival; he also could sense that it was draining magic and energy around it.
Nero was clearly trying to harvest a lot of magical energy for some nefarious end.
Faihan explained why he had not called upon the Chosen who had not received stones yet—explaining that Nero needed the magical energy of all the Chosen to do his world-ending magic, and so delaying the awakenings has been, in fact, to their benefit. But at this point, with the brothers missing...calling in the reserves was not off the table.
He thought there may be some kind of catalyst or totem or piece of magic in the near area that might break down the barrier if destroyed—allowing them access to the tree...which had grown another two storeys, while its radius of influence had increased another ten meters. It was clear that the bigger the tree was getting, the faster it was growing.
James believed that the relationship between the brothers' disappearance and the tree shouldn't be ignored, and so she and Eli called Fernanda, who said Aether was not there, and she didn't know where the cat is. They decided to ask Elpis, Slappy, and Sondheim to seek out the white cat to ask it what has become of the brothers, hoping it would provide another clue that could help them be rid of this tree and figure out what was actually going on here. Elpis was sent to the south, Slappy to the northwest, and Sondheim to the northeast.
In the meantime, Kaveh suggested they try to figure out the paths of the roots, as that might uncover magic related to the barrier that they could more easily dismantle. Faihan agreed this was a good idea. He asked if Mateo and Juliet would join them in looking for the roots—as well as the site of any magic that might be related to tree and barrier.
They each began to search around the tree: Mateo and Juliet further afield, Kaveh tracing its roots, and Faihan searching the area nearest to the tree. Faihan noticed a large flower sticking out of the tree's trunk and called to the others to point it out.
There was still a lot they did not know about the tree yet, so they decided to do a series of experiments. The flower could be important, but they would need to know what was possible first—starting with how long the barrier would stay up after an attack. Eli volunteered to give it a try, casting a fireball at the tree. He managed to avoid the attack's bounce back, losing only a hair to the fire. The barrier stayed up only a short time—three to five seconds. Which was good: they were not looking at a long cooldown there at least.
Kaveh noticed, during this, that red leaves had suddenly sprouted on the tree. They decided to do another test, to see if the color was related to the element. Kaveh attacked with a light breeze, green-cyan leaves sprouted up at the attack. The leaves, then, seemed to suggest that the tree had devoured many different elements already.
Eli wanted to test to see what would happen if two people attacked the barrier—without using magic—at the same time. Since the tree sucked up all magic, maybe a melee attack would yield better results. Mateo suggested that after that, depending on what happened, they should also try the reverse, and Faihan suggested trying to use opposing elements to see what would happen. Eli and Mateo prepared themselves to assault the tree as Faihan attacked with a dark spell to draw up the barrier.
The dark magic bounced back, but Faihan was not badly hurt. However, the counter left Mateo and Eli in a world of pain. They paused and retreated back from the barrier, as Faihan worked on healing the two. Kaveh began to look around, then, for electrical boxes and strange phenomenon around them, and James decided to help...but their results yielded little.
Mateo suggested that they could try again, but they shouldn't use their own bodies to field the blowback. They would need some kind of barrier (Kaveh thought) or dummy (Mateo suggested) to absorb the damage. Kaveh suggested maybe calling in the Tech Squad to see if they had anything that could get around the way the tree reflected all their attacks. Since Brisa lived nearby, they decided to call her.
As they waited, Faihan continued patching Mateo and Eli up. He explained, too, why he wanted to try to do opposing elements. In Elysium, he and Gaius had had a theory that there might be a higher element like "void"—and he had a suspicion that maybe that was the magic that "Nero" was aligned with. If they could do something somehow creational, maybe it would affect the tree, the barrier, or the overall spellwork in play. But he was hesitant to do anything without protection, seeing the damage that Eli and Mateo had taken.
The tree left them alone, since it was no longer under attack, giving them time to consider. It was during this lull that Faihan realized that he'd overlooked a key type of magic: healing magic. He decided to try one more experiment and sang the Hymn of Healing. The tree rippled, but did not absorb the magic, and when it blew back on him...he was, of course, unharmed.
An interesting development.
But he also didn't think they would be able to remove the barrier, or the tree, that night...which was a problem given how fast it had grown in only the hours since he had first approached it that afternoon. They couldn't get rid of it, but they couldn't leave it be—lest its radius of influence encompass all of Mar Luna by morning. He said, instead, that what they ought to do was try to see if magitech could nullify magic in the area surrounding the tree—cutting off (or limiting) its "food source" and potentially keeping it from growing much further. Mateo went to get his other job stone, and when Brisa arrived, she called Santi and Nati to come out and help with the effort to build something to stem the flow.
But just in case that would not work, Faihan also asked Kaveh and James to go through all the known Elysium citizens of Mar Luna and have them evacuate to Tabago Town—as far from Central Park as possible. Kaveh and James left to organize the evacuation, leaving Eli, Juliet, and Faihan to wait for the Tech Squad to arrive—and for any word on Aether's whereabouts...or that of the brothers.
In the meantime, Faihan suggested to his fellow Chosen that they may have to go a step further and do something very dangerous: infiltrate the home of Akane Araki...