Something unfamiliar, however, followed; after downing the elixir he retrieved a small jar from amidst the mess, smearing some of its greasy contents on each of his wounds in turn. They each closed in turn.

“Where’d you get that? The cream,” she asked, curiously. Zel had meant to procure that cream and the recipe for it eventually, using the Smoke Witch’s improved elixir formulation as leverage, but she found her own plans expedited by the redhead’s ambition.

“This? I just asked Torhild. She even told me how to make it, but I think the recipe will need adjusting before we can reproduce it in Ikesia. Apparently being able to make this stuff is the requirement for one to become a fully ordained shaman since it requires assistance from the spirits, which is why Jorfr isn’t considered one… At least Torhild said so. I’m pretty sure Jorfr has a monad colony, though, so who knows what’s up with that.”

“It might require assistance from monads he cannot commune with, or from daemons,” Zel shrugged. She considered telling him to not exploit his relationships for material gain, but the way he spoke about what he’d done overwhelmingly leaned towards a pure curiosity rather than opportunism.

“Daemons!” he beamed. “Of course, that has to be it. I recall reading about this one Ikesian tradition where they would enshrine old trees so that guardian spirits would take up residence in them and aid the village wise-men in producing healing poultices, this must be the Borean version of that…”

“How long did it take you to wrangle the amalgam?” she asked, knowing how fiddly it was even with her Metallomancy and seeing the bags under his eyes. The effects of Daytime Dust combined with sleep deprivation were evident in him, likely made worse by the lingering intoxication from last night, though he hadn’t drunk enough to induce a hangover. She was trying to get his mind back on track. Thunderous door-knocks could be heard from downstairs.

Blinking a few times as he closed the jar, he glanced back to his tablet again and squinted as he pulled an estimate out of thin air: “...Uh, a couple hours, probably.”

She glanced at how many jade-gold marbles he had and how many he had used just for his arm, uttering: “I’ll help you make the rest when we return. Get ready, I’ll just wake Zef and Jorfr and we’ll be off.”

“Oh, right. Yeah, I’ll be ready in a bit.”

Zef had woken by this point as well; she was busy filling an entirely new notebook with eldritch glyphs, her cadence purposeful but no longer feverish. She looked up at Zel with a warm smile, continuing to write as if she were still looking straight at the paper. To the wall were pinned various papers with glyph-patterns that Zel recognized, despite only partially understanding them. Between those references and their similarities to what Zef was writing, it was clear that the blonde was reworking her existing glyphs to Black Rod versions. No, that sounded wrong in her head. The Antediluvian prefix worked better, she thought.

“I’ll be ready, don’t worry. Hopefully those miraculous springs will make this hangover ease off a bit. Has Rikke shown up yet?” Zef said.

“No, but I’ve got a feeling…” Zel replied. Like clockwork there came a shout from Yvonne, calling that Rikke was here. Zel turned on a bootheel and jumped down to the first floor, taking care to roll so as not to risk breaking the floor.

“Are you a child? Use the stairs,” Yvonne jokingly reprimanded her as she passed by.

Rikke was waiting for her right in front of the longhouse.

She decided to just get it over with.

“Right, I told you to come back right around this time, Rikke the Chimera,” Zel said to the huge woman as she approached, feigning apathy.

Asgeir Ramdall stood some distance away, observing the exchange. He had taken pains to disguise himself rather than walking openly, trying to make it look like he was just a random gymnasium-goer, rather than the puppetmaster that he was. The pains he had taken were very much physical, as he had used a mutagen that changed him in subtle ways to make him unrecognizable. The transformation had been painful due to his low tolerance and physically weak constitution by Borean standards, but he was used to it.

Rikke wasted no time in laying out terms: “Come our battle, I will let you prepare first; swear upon thine honor that you shall not ready a surprise attack. This benefit of time I shall permit you for the purposes of preparation, that you may steel yourself, perform strength-summoning rituals… You should understand.”

“Yes yes, it’s a pre-holmgang powerup grace period,” Zel nodded along.

Rikke gave a nod, though she clearly didn’t like the terminology used.

“Once I invoke my Beast Selves, I will not be able to stop myself until my enemy is subdued or I fall unconscious. I must share such a warning if the battle is to be honorable - I might kill you.”

“...Hold on, Beast Selves? Was that plural?” Zel raised her eyebrows.

Rikke put on a confident, arrogant grin - a fake one. Zel could tell, even if the pride in her voice was real. It was tainted by self-hate, but real nonetheless.

“Three? You have three Beast Selves?!” the foreigner stood aghast, but… The fear or at least caution which he had expected to overtake her never came. She let out a chuckle of surprise, smugly remarking: “No wonder you look like that, I bet they’re near-impossible to control even with the typically-Borean ironclad will. Hell, I gave up on the idea of trying to control mine through brute force the moment an alternative presented itself. It truly is not worth it when you can just remind your other self that the whole benefits if all parts of the self act in unison… Ah, there I go again, giving away unearned advice. The terms of our holmgang - do you wish to change them?”