Explorer of Edregon

"Gone as in…" Vin asked, praying Malzar would inform him that she'd simply gone off to collect more herbs for her rituals, despite the solemn look he had on his face that already told him the boy's answer.

"She's dead. Or at least, she's not coming back," Malzar said with finality, as though there was no chance he was mistaken.

"Why don't you tell me what happened?" he asked, casting Stone Furniture and summoning two small chairs for them to sit in. Malzar aimlessly got up and plopped down in the offered seat, his mind already elsewhere as though he were reliving the events that had just occurred.

"The past few days, Madam Trebella had me running here and there, collecting a bunch of random materials from the forest that were different from what she tended to use in her more frequent rituals. Obviously, I wasn't going to ask her what she was planning to do, but it was strange enough that I took notice. I tried peeking in on the ritual chamber, and I spotted Xaril working on something. Something big."

Malzar paused, choosing his next words carefully, as if still afraid Madam Trebella would appear behind him at any moment despite his earlier proclamation.

"Xaril refused to tell me what kind of ritual Madam Trebella had him preparing, but he did let slip that she had recently prestiged. Apparently, it was the binding ritual that saved your friend and connected her to the golem that pushed her up and over into level 40."

"She didn't tell us she'd prestiged because of that," Vin muttered, slowly putting the pieces together and not liking what he was seeing. "So she prestiged, and after gaining her new class, she must have decided to go through with a new ritual."

"I think so… I've never seen a ritual as large or as complicated as the one she had Xaril preparing. It took him over a week to get it all set up, and the two of them then went over it again with a fine-tooth comb for days, ensuring everything was in the proper location. Even though he wouldn't tell me what it was for, when I tried to get Xaril to at least tell me when she was planning to activate the ritual, he told me he didn't know. Apparently, it was dependent on something happening that she hadn't even told him about."

Something such as the Gods enacting their own ritual to form a bridge between Edregon and Earth, perhaps? "Did you see her perform the ritual?"

"Yeah," he nodded, hunching his shoulders a bit. "We were eating lunch when she suddenly jerked up and took off toward the ritual chamber, ordering us all to stay put. The rest of the students followed her instructions, but I made an excuse to slip away. I crept down the stairs toward the ritual chamber, and…"

Malzar shuddered, reaching up to rub one of his small horns. "I… I don't even know how to describe what I saw. It was hard to make anything out with the crazy lights flashing around and all the tearing noises, but from what I could see, it looked as though Madam Trebella was attempting to rip a hole open in the air right in front of her. There was this jagged portal, steadily growing larger and more solid-looking, and I swear I saw Master Gunon of all people on the other side! He looked haggard and confused, and he went to reach through the portal to take Madam Trebella's outstretched hand. But the moment he tried to cross the portal…"

"There was a flash of light, and you guys were teleported down here?" Vin ventured, his heart reaching out for the poor infernals that had no idea why they'd been ripped away from their homes out of the blue.

"Yeah… The last thing I saw before the flash of light was the jagged portal in front of Madam Trebella exploding outward, completely enveloping her. If the light had been even a second slower, I think I would have been caught up in the blast as well."

Vin let out a heavy sigh he hadn't realized he'd been holding as Malzar finished his retelling and confirmed his suspicions. He hadn't expected Madam Trebella to do something as reckless as this, but then again, he really didn't know the infernal all that well. It had been obvious that she was struggling under the weight of trying to lead her people all on her own, but she was a hard woman that refused to show weakness. He could only assume she had been having a far rougher time of it than she'd let others know.

"I think I know what happened," he said after a moment, seeing Malzar's eyes snap onto his own, the Warlock hungry for answers. "From what you told me, it sounds like after prestiging a second time and getting a new class, Madam Trebella tried to piggyback off the Gods' own ritual somehow to reach back out to your old world in search of Master Gunon. I think doing so triggered some sort of God-tier fail-safe that was built into Edregon at its creation, pulling all of you guys down here and ejecting your fragment from the world itself. I'd always wondered what the point of the Underside even was, but I guess we finally have our answer."

"Wait, our fragment is gone?" Mazlar asked, blinking in shock at the news. "What do you mean it was 'ejected?'"

"Edregon was built with an entirely new System, completely isolated from the old universe for a reason," Vin tried to explain. He only knew the broad strokes of all this, but that should be more than enough. "The old System and rampant uses of divine magic were what was causing the monster spawn rates to continue growing higher and higher, which was going to lead to the collapse of basically the entire universe. When the Gods grabbed all the fragments, bringing them to Edregon and syncing everyone up to a new System, they must have made Edregon modular. I guess as a last-ditch safety measure, they also included a method of simply erasing fragments that showed signs of corruption or potential breaches that couldn't be contained. Such as Madam Trebella opening a physical portal back to your old world."

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All of this was entirely theoretical, but it was hard to argue with a massive void of absolute nothingness that stretched on for miles and miles. After hearing from Malzar what Madam Trebella had tried to do, his theory seemed like a safe bet.

"So we were all saved… but our village…" Malzar's eyes began watering, and Vin winced as he realized he could have been a tad more tactful in telling the young Warlock the only home he'd ever known was gone for good. Even when they'd been ripped away from their old world, at the very least the Gods had left them with their familiar village. "Where are we supposed to go?!"

"Don't worry, we'll figure something out," Vin said, awkwardly putting his arm around the sniffling infernal and shooting Lumel a pained grimace at his own awkwardness. For her part, the Dimensional Mage looked just as unsure about how to tackle this as he was. While their circumstances were similar in how she also couldn't return home, they were different enough that it didn't look like she had any bright ideas. Vin very well couldn't invite over a thousand infernals to come living with him in his new apartment after all.

Or at the very least, he couldn't invite them to his apartment…

"You guys just sit tight here for a bit, alright?" he said, patting Malzar on the back one last time before getting to his feet. "I'll get you guys out of here before too much longer, but I need to check in with some of my own people first. I know you don't really want to talk to anyone right now, but do you think you could try and tell your aunt Agne what you told me? She can take care of spreading the word to everyone else."

"I can do that," Malzar nodded, sniffling and rubbing his watery eyes. "Thank you for your help, Vin."

"Anytime," he said, giving him one last warm smile before taking Lumel's hand and leading her toward the Underside room mirroring Terra. Once they were out of earshot, Lumel asked the obvious question.

"You're going to ask Spur to let the infernals join Terra?"

"I don't really have any better ideas," he admitted, already getting to work on how he was going to word his request. "They can't exactly stay down here in the Underside, and we can't just drop them off on their own in some empty fragment. That's not fair to them. Not to mention I technically owe Madam Trebella a favor, and I was already planning on hosting Xaril and Malzar for the foreseeable future."

Vin hadn't actually told anyone this other than Spur, but in exchange for lending them her truth-gem, Madam Trebella had requested he take Xaril and Malzar off her hands for at least a couple of weeks to give them a taste of life outside the village. According to her, it was all a part of her grand plan to get Xaril some more life experience and better prepare him for the role of becoming one of the village leaders. But now, he couldn't help but wonder if this had all been part of some master back-up plan in the event her ritual fell through and she wound up killing herself. There was no way she could have known that everyone would be without their home due to her ritual, so it made sense at the very least that Xaril, easily the least capable of taking care of himself, would be the main one she'd be worried for in her absence.

"We already let the Bands join us, so what's another thousand-ish people?" Vin said nonchalantly, wincing at his own words. He knew that wasn't really the best reasoning, but it wasn't exactly wrong, either. "Alright, yeah, it's not a great thing to spring on the council. But really, what alternative do I have?"

"I agree with you, but I'm not the one you need to convince," Lumel pointed out, squeezing his hand reassuringly. "Maybe try and focus on their skills when it comes to gathering, and their ritual magic. One area Terra is drastically lacking in right now is magical defenses. I bet if you spin it in that direction, suggesting that the infernals might be able to enchant the walls and give them actual stopping power before the monsters tied to the fifth wave show up, that will make the council more likely to take them in."

"What would I do without you?" Vin asked, earning a satisfied blush from Lumel. "At the very least, because not everyone from the fourth wave made it over, I know we have at least that many empty apartments already constructed. It won't be nearly enough for all the infernals, but it wouldn't be the first time we needed to use temporary housing. We also still have the area outside of town that I helped build, where the third wavers slept in before we had their apartments built. The more I think about it, the more doable I think this really is."

It was only at that moment a sudden logistical thought struck him, and he paused. "Wait, how are we even going to get them out of there? Assuming none of the infernals ever left their fragment, we'll need to rely on your dimensional magic to force one of the corridors open for them, right? And you can only do that a few times before you're drained. There's like a thousand of them!"

"Actually, I can feel a shift in the Underside stretching a couple of rooms in all directions with the infernals' as the central point," Lumel said, laying a hand on the smooth texture of the unique walls making up the extradimensional space. "I'm pretty certain you can use your Dungoneering skill to temporarily open the corridors up and allow everyone to flow through from one room to the next. Best guess, I think you can do that up to three fragments away, and it's only going to last for the next twenty four hours or so, but that should be enough to lead them all over to Terra."

"I suppose that makes sense, seeing as the Underside is looking like it was designed to rescue and relocate people in the event their fragments were compromised," Vin muttered. "It would be a pretty stupid idea if they were just trapped down here after being saved. Alright, in that case, all we need to worry about is convincing the council to let a thousand strangers that look like literal demons come and live with us. How hard could that be?"