You quickly slice at the creature, getting the quicksilver or whatever it is all over your blade. Then you hurriedly move away and draw a new circle around yourself. The creatures seem confused and then resume staring at the illusion after a while. Except the one you just stabbed. That one seems unconcerned with the illusion, for whatever reason. You can’t pretend to know how these things think. But it’s staying near the point it…
“Here’s a thought,” you say. “You can get the illusion to follow me; but can you also get it to stay still? If we turn it into something they feel they need to deal with, that might distract them while I get the box in place.” The problem with that is, they’re not reacting to the illusion, they’re reacting to the ether… but I might be able to set up the illusion so the ether…
“Let’s start by testing the illusions,” you muse. “I’ll stay still and you make me look like one of them.” I don’t actually know what they look like. Can’t get a good look from this distance, none of the spells I have for that are working well with whatever’s going on there. Though, I suppose I can use the mental link to look through your eyes if you don’t mind me borrowing your senses –…
“Well, it would help if I could see the box better,” you say, mostly thinking out loud. “I might have to dodge the creatures while moving it, and then I could lose track of it. So you could get me some dirt or something I could stick to the box to make it easier to see.” I think I see an option for that. I’ll work out a way to get it to you. Any…
Theoretically, I could locate it if I were actually on the roof, the wizard replies. But the ether there is hard to sense in any detail from a distance. It’s like staring at a fog bank. And it’s more dangerous there for me than for you. “Locating it isn’t a problem, I just saw two more come out and it seemed to be from the same place,” you reply. “Could you, I don’t know, seal…
Those creatures are corrupting the ether. Fortunately, if you have some of their substance on your sword, we can make use of that. Try to make a circle with it around you. It’s an odd command, but you do your best to draw a circle with the strange substance. Now the monsters seem confused again. All right, that should keep them from doing anything to you. I’m afraid you won’t be able to stay in…
You almost miss it. There’s a transparent box of some sort. So transparent you have to struggle to see it. It seems to be open. And there’s a tiny thing inside it. It looks like some kind of thorn. It’s also glowing a strange color. Carefully, you close the barely-visible lid to the box. The thorn keeps glowing. But the creatures suddenly turn towards you. Was that glowing thing somehow confusing them? What in the…
Its shape resembles a huge bird, but it’s got no feathers and seems to be made out of metal. Some sort of liquefied metal, at that – your sword just slices right through it, and gets covered in whatever the hells it’s made of. “And what do I do if hitting it with a sword doesn’t work?” you ask. There’s no answer. That’s when you realize that the mental link was a spell, so it…
“Any idea how good a robe is at gliding?” you ask. “It’s the easiest thing to get a hold of, since I’m already wearing it.” If you hold it the right way, it will slow your descent a bit, but not that much, the wizard replies. You’d have better results with something bigger. “Like a sail, maybe?” you muse. “I know where there’s a storehouse nearby that has some.” That’s probably too big, but it’s…
“How close can you fly something to the roof?” Not very, at least not for more than a second or two. Any spell effect would become unstable well before approaching the roof itself. So I wouldn’t be able to maintain, say, a Lightweight spell. If I tried, it could cause unpredictable effects. You figured it wouldn’t be that easy. “But what if you could lighten me, launch me into the air with a catapult, and…