Carmen sat down across from a man dressed in casual clothes. If you ignored the fox ears and tail, he was about as average as could be. Brown hair, brown eyes, a bit on the short side. He wore a friendly smile, and generally looked like someone who was ready to make friends with you without any provocation.

“Hi, I’m Yamato!” He said, reaching out a hand to shake. Carmen took it and shook, looking him in the eyes.

“And I’m Carmen, pleasure to meet you.” Yeah, she didn’t trust this guy as far as she could throw him. Which was…pretty far now? Alright, not the best metaphor. Point was, no one who reaches a position of power like he has gets there without some skeletons in the closet. There’s no chance he was as simple and friendly as he was making himself out to be.

Ignorant of Carmen’s inner monologue, he continued. “I know we’ve met before, but that was always under more professional circumstances. Right now, I’m not Yamato the Councilman, I’m Yamato the mage, and I wanted to start that impression on the right foot.”

“I was surprised when your body just turned itself back after I changed it. I don’t think anyone’s actually tried to change the base form of a Perfect Chimera before, so naturally that was a puzzle to me.”

“So, I want to do some more experimentation to see if we can figure out why and hopefully work around it. You won’t be doing this for free, of course, I’ll be sure to give you a thorough lesson in what I’m doing. I was pretty impressed with your work on Alex and Raphael, so I want to nurture your talent as much as I can.”

He motioned to a machine at the side of the room. “If you want to make the process more efficient, you can sit in there. I can perform its functions manually, it’ll just be slower. I understand that not everyone’s comfortable with hopping in some unknown machine, so I understand if you don’t want to. I promise that it won’t cause any additional discomfort to you, though.”

Carmen raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “Additional?”

Yamato shrugged. “Usually I would say no discomfort, but there’s enough unknown with you that I can’t be sure my normal processes won’t end up uncomfortable.”

“I suppose that’s fair. I’ll sit in your machine for now, but I reserve the right to break out should you try and do anything to me or keep me in there for longer than I want to be in there.”

“Of course. Let me know the instant you want out and I’ll shut it off. It may take a little bit to fully shut off, so bear with it while it does that when the time comes.”

Carmen walked over to the machine and laid herself down on the bed provided. Yamato went over to a terminal on the side and the bed slid inside the machine. Metallic arms ending in some sort of padding lowered and gently placed themselves on various parts of Carmen’s body. A soft current of magic began running through some of them, and Yamato’s voice came through a speaker near the top of the machine.

“Can you hear me alright? There’s a microphone in there so just talk back normally, I’ll hear.”

“Yeah, I can hear you fine.” Carmen replied.

“Good. Now, right now I’m just running tests to determine how resistant your body is to change. Everyone has a different threshold, so I’m just getting a feel for it. While I do that, though, I want to give you a little more context about what’s going on with the Council, because I feel that it’s unfair that some of us are trying to use you while leaving you in the dark.”

“You’re not even going to try and hide the fact that you want to use me?” Carmen said icily.

“Well, as much as I would like to say I don’t want to use you, that’d be a lie. Unfortunately, just about everyone important you meet is going to want to use you. You’re like the magical equivalent of a nuclear weapon. You’ve got a lot of clout, especially if people don’t know you’re new to magic.”

The magic sensations stopped briefly, and the sound of typing came through the microphone.

“Interesting. Your body is the least resistant to permanent transformation that I’ve ever seen. It’s about as close to completely unresistant as you can physically get. But, if I try temporary transformations, you have an above average resistance. Usually, those two resistances aren’t significantly different if you don’t have any Skills or Traits that would change them. Do you have any of those?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Very interesting. Go ahead and change your right arm using Eldritch Abomination, I want to see what it looks like.”

She did, and the buzz of magic from the rods connected to her right arm resumed.

“Anyway, I think it’s especially important that you are aware of the factions within the Council, as they’ve formed based on how they feel about Earth. I’m in what we call the lenient faction, which consists of myself and Kali. We’re all for reintegrating Earth and Haven eventually, and so your existence is pretty convenient for us. If things turn out well with you, we can try and leverage that to help us make our case.”

The magic stopped, and once again there was typing.

“Strange. It’s a temporary change with a duration of forever. So, it could theoretically be dispelled, but otherwise it'll just stay on without getting caught by whatever is keeping your permanent form like this. Weird. Alright, you can change your arm back now. I’m going to be trying some permanent changes and testing how long it takes to turn back, don’t be alarmed when that happens.”

Carmen shifted her arm back and the magic once again resumed all over her body.

“The next faction is the moderates, Tunem and Enna. They don’t have a strong opinion on the issue and tend to work towards their own devices. If we want to make any changes, we have to win them over, because the last faction, the militants, has three people, Elenoa, Gabriel, and Baern. They want to keep the status quo with Earth, and Baern even advocates for the removal of all humans from Haven. Fortunately, that one doesn’t go down well even with the rest of the faction, so whenever it comes up it’s quickly dismissed.”

“You probably don’t have as much to worry about from the moderates, they might try and get you to help with some of their personal worries, but I don’t think they’ll try to use you as a political tool regarding Earth. What you really have to be careful with is the militant faction. As I’m sure you’re already aware, they want to keep you on a short leash and use you as a personal weapon. They don’t trust you just because you were born on Earth, which I think is rather unfair, but there’s not much I can do about that that I’m not already doing.”

“But I think that’s all you need to know at this moment about politics. I’ve just about finished your scan, so I’m going to shut down the machine and I’ll teach you how this all was done.”

About a minute later, they were both out, and Yamato was showing Carmen exactly what he did. Though, to her, the techniques she learned were less important than the information she gained on the Council.

Each member was generally regarded as the top of their field in some area. Tunem was the best diviner anyone knew. Kali had a command of mental magic far greater than anything anyone had ever seen. Yamato was the best with transformation, the faeries aside.

Elenoa apparently specialized in healing and purification, supposedly able to heal entire battlefields of soldiers at once. People hailed her as some sort of saint or hero, but Carmen assumed that they had just never met the woman. Carmen admitted that maybe once upon a time she had been the selfless paragon of virtue that everyone said she is, but if she was, Carmen maintained that she’d long since been corrupted by power.

Enna was an elvish woman who focused on banishment and sealing. Apparently, she was the busiest of everyone on the Council, as she was in charge of making sure the barriers around the three cities in Haven were maintained, and any rogue monsters that got inside were sent away. As such, she had decided to not take a significant stance on most political issues, but when it came to the defenses of Haven, she was very vocal, and people usually listened.

If Yamato was to be believed, Gabriel was a pretty good guy who was practically forced into the strict faction. Due to what had happened in the aftermath of the war, the angels were able to make themselves the only race with more than one representative on the Council, and Elenoa was head of all the angels. Any time he would make a suggestion that went even slightly against what Elenoa wanted, she immediately shot him down and he would never bring it up again. He was an expert in spatial manipulation and was actually the one responsible for making most of the demiplanes that the Council used.

The last on the list was Baern, a dwarfish specialist in siege magic and strategy. He had been the Protectorate’s lead general in the war, and he had never quite slipped out of the mindset. He distrusted humans on principle, something which Yamato attributed to losing a lot of friends to humans during the war.

Carmen wasn’t quite so sympathetic. Even if he did lose friends, most of their killers would be dead by now. The only way humans from the war could still be alive was to be with the Protectorate, or to be in the upper echelons of the Society. To her it sounded like he needed to wake up to reality and realize that his aggression is mostly misplaced.

She was forced to admit, much to her annoyance, that Yamato was easy to talk to. He never looked down on her, actually listened to what she said, and was more than willing to clarify what he could. It didn’t mean that she thought his attitude wasn’t a façade, but she would be forced to admit he was a remarkably good actor.

Their time together ended about half an hour later, and Carmen thanked him for his lesson before hurrying off to meet up with Alex and Vithi, thinking about her situation while she walked.

To her, the only ones on the Council she was willing to trust were Tunem and Enna. Enna seemed to be the most straightforward of the bunch, and probably wouldn’t have any interest in her and Lilith other than adding them to the defense of Haven. And, for the time being, she would be willing to stomach that. Her intermittent spars with Agathe showed her that, despite the overwhelming difference in their specs, she lacked experience. The woman would always have some trick that Carmen wasn’t expecting and was generally able to at the very least deal what would be a significant blow if they weren’t just training.

This was, of course, provided that she kept Horrid Fascination off. It had already been demonstrated that the Skill would completely cripple Agathe and keep her from doing…anything. So, they had banned the Skill from their spars as she wouldn’t actually learn anything from just keeping it on. And that was probably for the best. Anyone she couldn’t just bulldoze over with raw strength would likely have some form of resistance to it, and if she was without any form of combat experience she would probably be instantly defeated.

That aside, Tunem had shown capacity for scheming, but he had also not tried anything during the time she had been in his demiplane. He had always been too busy with some high-level divination ritual, teaching his apprentices, or miscellaneous clerical work to interact with her on any serious level, so she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. For now.

As for the others, she obviously wasn’t going to listen to the militant faction. Elenoa already hated her, Gabriel was chained to her will, and Baern seemed like he was also likely to hate her, given her original race. Yamato was too nice, and Kali was already under suspicion for other reasons.

So, she wasn’t expecting any no-strings-attached aid from the Council in the near future. That was a matter for another time, though, as she had reached her meeting spot, and Alex and Vithi were waiting for her.

“So, what did you think of Yamato?” Alex asked, getting up from the stump she was sitting on and walking over to Carmen.

“Don’t trust him. He’s too friendly for his position. I’m pretty sure it’s just an act.”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t think so, but I doubt whatever I can say will convince you. Anyway, here’s a divination spellbook. I was able to grab one of the more encyclopedic ones, containing spells from all levels, but given dad thinks it’s for me, that’s the best I could do. I can’t get access to the super complex stuff because I probably wouldn’t be able to use it well at all, sorry.” She pressed a heavy book into Carmen’s hands. “Not sure why you didn’t just ask him, though. I’m sure he’d be more than willing to part with a book for you.”

Carmen grabbed the book, flipping it open and beginning to scan through the contents. “Not only am I already borrowing books from him, I haven’t shown a shred of interest in divination so far. I don’t have the mana required for big spells anyway, so I don’t want him getting all suspicious and looking into what we’re doing. The last thing we need is him finding out and sharing information with the rest of the Council. That’d lead to Kali coming over and nipping our investigation in the bud.”

“I don’t know about that,” Vithi said, “but I’ll let it slide until I feel like we’re not making any progress. As for me, I’ve got a device that’ll trace someone’s magical signature, but I don’t think that’ll be useful without a way to find that signature, and we can’t get that unless there’s something with their magic inside of it or if they’ve used magic in the area recently. To make matters worse, if a teleport jumps planes it can’t track the destination, and the trail has to be less than two weeks old.”

Carmen’s eyes lit up. “I can work with that. Can you fetch the tool?”

“Yeah, give me a couple of minutes.” Vithi said, retreating into her lair. A few minutes later she came back holding a large spherical object, which she handed to Carmen. “Alright, what’s your master plan here? Are you holding onto some object this mystery person has put a lot of magic into?”

Carmen smiled. “Something like that. How do you use it?”

“Just press this button…here.” Vithi said, pointing at a button. “Then it’ll open up and start gathering energy. Once it’s finished, whoever’s holding it will be able to see that magic as a sort of trail on the ground.”

“Perfect.” Carmen pushed the button and stuck her hand inside. She smirked as the two watched her, confused. “Our magical signature should be the same.” She said. “And it’s only been a few days. We’ve got a shot, at least.”

“That’s not possible.” Vithi said. “No two people have the same magical signature. It’s like your fingerprint, but not even identical twins are going to share a signature. In all the time since we’ve found out how to test signatures, which is a long time, we haven’t seen two that are the same. Ever.”

“She’s right, sorry. I don’t know where you’re getting this idea from, but the only person with that signature is you.” Alex added.

“Not a problem.” Carmen said, pulling her hand out of the machine. “Doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got the same signature.” She began striding off towards their house, and the other two ran to catch up.

“No, listen here, you two would have to be exactly the same person. And, given that you're right here, you’re not going to get anywhere with this.” Vithi argued.

Carmen stopped and looked her in the eye. “Well, since this seems to be getting through whatever block has been set up, everything you said about magical signatures is correct. We also have the same signature, and I can tell you that without even knowing anything about magical signatures. So, think about that.”

There was silence for the rest of the walk. Once they were back in the house, Carmen made straight for the empty room, and found that there was indeed traces of magic in there.

“Perfect.” She said. “I picked up the trail.”

“Give it here.” Vithi said, and Carmen handed her the ball. She walked around the room, frowning.

“Well?” Alex asked.

“She’s right. For some reason, we’ve got traces of Carmen’s magic all over this room. Like she was living in here.”

Alex blinked. “Cool. Now what? If whoever we’re looking for lived in this room, they would have gone in and out a lot. We’re going to have to follow most of those trails to find out where they went, and it’s going to get mixed in with Carmen’s trails and it’ll be a huge mess.”

Vithi stopped near the bed. “Maybe not. One of the stronger trails just…ends here. Doesn’t fade out, just suddenly cuts off. Which means planar teleportation. We’re out of luck.”

Carmen shook her head. “Just means we’ll need a way to track a planar teleport. Or we’ll need to look back in time and see what happened. If I can see a spell array or hear a chant, I can memorize it and copy it to find out where it goes.”

Hold on, Lilith. I’m coming.