No long description where I ramble and complain today… super late. On the bright side, I think I made my last trip to my old house this weekend, so moving is official done. Done I say (glaring a the boxes sitting all around waiting to be unpacked…)

It does seem like Mium’s shirt has acquired some holes as well. Guess he’s been busy since we last saw him. Arkady has heard quite a bit about Mium from Ila, and most of what he has heard concerns him greatly, so he’s not quite sure what to do when suddenly confronted by the actual Mium.

Does Mium intentionally sneak up behind people, or does he just happen to come from the direction they are facing away from by chance? Who knows… who knows indeed.

We are closing in on the end of Chapter 15… very closing in. Of course, that just means the start of Chapter 16, but hey.

The nations of this world don’t really have great information on the IDS as we are seeing. The Consul’s comment here comes off as a bit more naive than it is – she didn’t expect the IDS to be weak., but she expected their strength to be in their technology, autocasters, and manpower (from PACT), and that these things could not quickly be brought to bear. By using powerful mages (which she didn’t expect the IDS to have a direct counter to) she was hoping to route them before they could bring their strengths to bear (again, mostly PACT).

This thought was somewhat blasted from the sky when Kally attempted to destroy the skyhammer attack, but that occurred after the Consul gave the order for the Registered Mages to start solo blasting their way through IDS compounds. And in the Consul’s defense, for the most part it worked. As we saw from Tyler’s first assault, having a powerful known mage storm the compound prevented a lot of the people that might have deployed to defend from even trying – it was a largely successful intimidation to PACT. The Consul just didn’t really have perspective to appreciate what the difference between Corporate Affairs/PACT branches and Situation Containment branches (that contained people like Elizabeth).

The Consul largely expected the majority of the moderately powerful mages to be from PACT, who would likely break seeing Family mages go in spells blazing, but the points where that planned ended up failing was Situation Containment and places where Orish Warmages were involved.

Huh that ended up being a fairly long ramble anyway. Anyway, good morning!