Chapter 26: Results

BELIAL

This cannot be!!! Someone had destroyed all of my statues. How had they known about me plans? I resorted to scrying with a crystal ball to determine what had happened.

The image swirled into place, as the clouds of ether parted, allowing me to see events in the past and the future. In the future, I saw the Oracle of Tao. I was curious about that so I focused, and saw the Oracle lose. Nevermind then. I paid no attention to a further prediction concerning a large earthenware urn, instead focusing all my attention on what happened in the past. Let's see here... Apparently that fox Rena got sick from the fumes of my darkness. Then it looks like she tried to trace the darkness back to its source. Then she got possessed, only for the Oracle to break the Statues by accident when the possession was disentangled.

A pity. Having her spirit darkened, and making her a demoniac would have been a a suitable outcome. Oh well. Within the month, I will visit the arctic zones again, and possibly even plant more along the outer rims of the Middle Earth and Ancient Earth. This was merely a setback. I would have time to make things go my way...

Soon.

AELLISA

I analyzed this set of runes for days, hoping to figure out how it worked. But I had hit an impasse. I should have figured it out by then, but instead, I became chronically distracted by fatigue and general malaise. The others besides Alicia and Javert also seemed sick, so I suspected our sickness had a great deal to do with our immortality and spiritual ability. But for some reason, Rena caught a particularly bad case of it. As for me, I was forced to rest in my bed for most of the time, with a small plastic wastebasket nearby in case I vomited. Yet despite the gross feeling in my system, my body was congested and I couldn't manage to get anything out. It was like a dry flu or something. I had dizziness and fatigue, and the constant feeling of dehydration, but without a feeling that my body was willing or able to get rid of the sickness. Chills ripped through my body, and I was unable to get anything productive done. I immediately suspected that this sickness was from Belial, as if the fact that we immortals don't become sick wasn't a big enough hint.

Then as suddenly as it had come, my illness washed away. I could get up and run around, as well as I had days before the sickness came. More importantly, I could concentrate, so I set to work decoding the demonic runes into a readable language. This was the key part of this. Magic can be reprogrammed or dispelled, but only if you understand the language of the effect. I set to work decoding that the Dark Tongue was not Orcish or Goblin language, but indeed Demonic. Matching the spoken language with the written language meant that I could in turn figure out grammar and meaning, in much the same way as someone determining that Chinese-looking characters were Japanese kanji instead of actual Chinese. I knew that Angelic and Demonic were the same spoken language but a different text, so from there I was able to analyze grammar from an old passage in the Symbolic alphabet of Angelic. Finally, I was able to grasp the meaning of the characters, and to write «Trace this letter back to Belial» in Demonic.

"Eureka! I've done it!" I said in Demonic, forgetting myself in extreme nerdiness. Then I realized that those around me not only couldn't understand me, but because of the deep tone of Demonic, were somewhat frightened. "...Are you okay?" Arboria asked. I tried again, "'Eureka! I've done it,' I said. We now have a means to track Belial." Alicia said, "That's great! How does it work." Only for me to say, "Ummmm...." I had just realized that Belial's means of tracking involved actual demonic magic, which I didn't have.

And so, Autumntwig and I worked together crafting a device that looked based on a polygraph machine and a record player. I inserted a Gleason world map into the machine, and attached a probe to the letter with the new runes. We would not have to ask true/false questions to the envelope, the needle would simply spin in progressively smaller circles until it found a hit, and then it would react. "It's not doing anything," Marina said, as it made its way nearly to the center without a reaction. But then right at the North Pole, the needle circled around three times and made the Star of David symbol. "Great," said Rena, "he lives in Santa's Village."

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