Trouble follows the Astral Advent and its members around like a bad gil coin.
The white crystal from the beach party had started causing trouble once more. Left under the care of the Arcanist’s Guild, the mages were performing some minor aetherial tests upon it, when one in particular attempted to cast a Protect spell upon it to shield it for storage. The power of the spell was magnified beyond anything that had previously been seen and was considered unbreakable. Thus, were the Agents called in to assist with breaking the barrier down.
It seemed a fair number of people were interested in assisting, almost twenty people in total, and N’hara had a feeling a few of them were there to try and smash the damned thing to bits, but nobody could do anything unless the shield was broken. The arcanist responsible for casting the spell, a man named Hartsald, escorted the group to a secured location near Summerford Farms. The barrier itself was roughly the size of a chocobo and shaped as a tesseract, something N’hara was clearly not anticipating.
The first attempt to damage the shield was met with a violent physical repelling of Zaius’s punch. The second attempt was a vortex of air, which the barrier responded by attuning itself to ice to better resist the element. It was proposed that assaulting the barrier with an element to which the current shield was weak to would allow them to break it. With wind used, thanks to Dylan, fire was next.
Aulen, Martin, and Edari Garani provided the fire, which retaliated with wind.
N’hara, Sejad Moon, and a strange mage supplied the ice, which did not retaliate, but opened itself up to physical attacks while it quickly attuned to earth. Cerina, Aulen, Balthius, Ciel, and Lian’dr Garani joined N’hara in bombarding the barrier with physical attacks.
The pulse of aether that was released by the shattering Protect spell caused the barriers that the rest of the group had used for defense against them. Reks, Dylan, and Suwan were trapped in barriers of water, which slowly began to fill and threaten to drown them. Sejad was encased in a shield of unaspected aether, and Sergei was locked in his own Heart of Stone, along with another barrier that encased the rest of the group, save Cerina, Balthius, and N’hara, who had been physically close to the crystal at the time.
Weapons of all types were brought to bear against the barriers, shattering them one at a time to free their allies from their entrapment.
Once the shield surrounding Sergei had fallen, the highlander retrieved the crystal, using his skill at withholding the use of aether to maintain a measure of control over the artifact. With the knowledge that the crystal would be strongly protected by such a barrier, the guild decided to stash it in a back room somewhere and leave it to gather dust, unable to affect the outside world.
The arrangement seemed acceptable for the moment, and with the crystal in hand, Sergei led the group back to Limsa Lominsa for proper storage this time around.
As the group walked back, N’hara’s attention couldn’t help but be pulled back towards the strange mage in a black cloak that had assisted them, assisted him with the ice attack. He knew a good number of people who worked for the Astral Agents and the number of people who were aware of the crystal, aware of the barrier, and were a miqo’te with purple fur was a dangerously small list…
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