Then I went upstairs and slept like the dead.
The next morning I returned to the basement. I focused on gathering in as much available potency as I could, and carefully fed it right back into the storage diagram. Since it was only a few days after the full moon the power came to me fairly smoothly but still with enough hiccups and unsteadiness to remind me of why I used the storage diagram. I could feed potency in as unevenly as I wanted, but when it came time to use that stored power, I’d be able to draw it out in a smooth and steady flow. Glitches in the flow of power during a summoning tended to make for a dead summoner. I had enough threats to my person as it was. No need to take any unnecessary risks.
I was sweating with the effort after about thirty minutes, but it pleased me to see that I was already probably quite close to having enough for a summoning. After moving on to a quick shower and fresh clothing, I was ready to go meet the rest of our fine posse at Grounds For Arrest for a discussion of strategy.
Despite my thoroughly reasonable suggestion to test my theory by shoving the mayor into a small closet and then throwing the cat in there with him, the others overruled me and decided that it might be more prudent to simply approach him with cat in hand and watch Fuzzykins’s reaction. It was also decided that it’d be best if I wasn’t anywhere around, and that Eilahn should be the one to approach him, since, as far as we knew, he’d never encountered her.
Fine. But I still intended to watch from a distance. With binoculars. If there was any chance that I’d get to see the mayor’s face get clawed off, I didn’t want to miss it.
The plan was simple. Eilahn would have Fuzzykins in her arms and would wait for the mayor to come out of the City Administration building. She would “accidentally” walk into him, and we could then see how well my arcane-ability-detecting cat worked. Hopefully, with lots of blood. Then, once we confirmed that he was our bad guy summoner, Eilahn could somehow subdue him, we’d load him into the car, and then proceed to dig out every detail of this arcane-enhancing, multiple-stroke-inducing drug and his plan for tracking down the portals.
Really, it was a perfectly sensible plan.
Ryan an