They had all wiped themselves clean. The protesting was subdued this time. Because, finally, they had remembered Jake Dorsette was truly an Archmage. No matter how approachable he may have seemed, he was one of the most powerful men in their country, and they'd do well to remember that. The candidates stood behind their chairs, since most were uncomfortable, with their food being stuck to them.

Froyd noticed, Mr. Dorsette's robes were still white. He observed them quietly, Froyd did his best not to glare, Danisha didn't do so well. Froyd knew if the man were even just a rank lower, a magus,  she would've attacked him by now. He'd looked to his cousin, Charlene, who for lack of better words, was pretty, and knew it. Long brunette hair, brown eyes behind her glasses, made her standout. She kept looking at her clothes with a sad expression. They would be on Merry's Cay for a year, so replacing anything they had lost would be impossible. 

"The Maypole ceremony is held every two years, on December 21. It is a spiritual, connecting mages to the Divine Planes, and higher beings, there in." The mage's voice took the quiet unrest as it home. "You will, when contacting the divine, act in an individual capacity. You will be given a maypole and journey into The Forest." If his expression was to be believed, he was genuinely concerned., and even seemed pensive. "Normally this is dangerous in of itself, but this year a Farseer, a divine envoy, has volunteered to repair Merry's long-broken array."

"Excuse me, sir" A candidate Froyd, hadn't noticed before held a hand up.

"Simon Colebrook?" The youngman nodded. He said. "Go on, then"

"Someone from the Dorvill Empire has to come just to fix an array? Don't we have our own engineers?"

"The sheer Mana weight invovled would kill a hundred arch mages. So don't even think about something so silly." They'd gasped. Most in the room knew just how powerfully Arch mages were. A single Archmages could level a forest twenty of miles. And historically, they done even more. 

"Don't ask me about the envoy. I won't tell you anymore." He was well aware he had already overstepped his official position. But because of a certain reason, he had no reason to worry.

"We've all heard this before, sir." A girl with tanned skin, and green eyes said.  "At least, I've been told about the island.  There's only class one aberrations in the forest. I think I speak for all of us, when I say..."

"No, you may not be able to handle it, after the repairs." He wanted to say, envoy usually only moved for higher purposes, but he'd caught himself. "Alright then, raise you hand, if you are familiar with The Painted Veil Theory." He sighed, when only five of them had done so. Froyd, Danisha, and John, included. Charlenne had never been one to study, and didn't expect anything from the others, it was an obscure study. 

The Archmage asked. "Do any of you know where aberrations come from?"

"It has something to do with the Perry Shifters, right, sir?"

"Yes and no. Aberrations appear naturally, like the ones you will all will be meeting on Merry. But the Perry Shifters? I can use that as a great stepping stone to explain the painted veil theory." He'd leaned forward. "Our world is in constant contact with all inhabited worlds. This had only been a theory up until two hundred years ago. But, Perry Newman, a hobbyist in the field of formations, proved it correct." 

"It was shocking! He'd lacked proper training, the support of the national mages guild, and hadn't been vetted by anyone of note. Perhaps this is why he succeeded in finding the link between worlds. You would have to be stupid to do what Perry did."

"You see Perry would construct random formations in very unsettling places. Those places included grave yards, abandoned houses, and places where people were known to go missing. He did this until he got lucky. One day Perry went to a location where a little girl had went missing. The mana in that was ominous, so ominous that even a none mage like Perry had felt unsettled."

"And so he set his formation, and that is when we lost Northern Point, on Narrin to the Great calamity of 1820. It took two month of fighting, with a notably mighty line up of some of our country's greatest mages at the time to subdue the aberrations, and destroy the perry shifter formation."

"Now, I would like to clarify, that actually Perry hadn't actually started off blindly. Investigation, after his death, revealed he had found very ancient Chicanian documents containing highly conceptually application of Mana. Application they used themselves on several of our now Lionian islands, one of course being Merry."

ss