Goslin Volpe ducks another flaming projectile with a yelp, rolling behind a particularly solid seeming segment of broken statue. With one hand she tears her now smouldering Master’s cap from her head, throwing it to the ground and stamping sharply to extinguish the azure sparks chewing on its dense forest green wool, and with the other clutches tighter the delicate terracotta pot she was presented with minutes ago by her tutor, Master Botanist Tristram Jax the Seventh.
Unfortunately for Master Jax, he was no longer a bumbling, kindly soul with chlorophyll stained fingers and a penchant for custard tarts, but instead a whirling maelstrom of golden gyres and puckering irises, from each of which spewed sinusoidal jolts of blue plasma. Beautiful and terrible, the creature had, over the course of the last ninety seconds or so, transformed the beautiful neogothic grand hall of Liverwort College into total desolation, with half of the graduating class dead and the rest fled or hiding. Most of the actual faculty, though technically all holders of the title of Philosopher Witch alongside their various other accolades, were somewhat inept when it came to practical, let along belligerent magics, and so had fared little better.
As a result, until someone with a touch more experience arrived, the task of dispatching or otherwise incapacitating the former Botanist lay at the feet of Goslin and her three friends who had come to support her. Keeping her head low, Goslin glances over her shoulder to the guest seating near the back of the hall, where she could see the tops of three heads poking around the edge of a hastily assembled stack of benches. Over the ear splitting shattering of a stained glass window crashing to the ground, Goslin screams a spell,
As the hurriedly patched together piece of Doggerel suffuses the dust in the air of the ruined hall, a velvety curtain of rose petal bleeds through from elsewhere, separating most of the room from the monstrosity on the stage. Blue impacts blossom against the other side but do not break through the shield, for now. Most still hidden take the chance and break for the doors, but four remain; Goslin, Vinnie, Freyja and Wren regroup at the bench pile, no doubt to calmly and efficiently form a plan of attack.
“WHAT THE BLOODY HELL IS THAT?” shouts Vinnie, tugging on his long blonde tresses in distress. “This has to be one of the extrusions Bladdergeist was rambling about” says Goslin, as Wren places their hands on Vinnie’s shoulders to try to calm him down. “Master Jax must have had an anchor, like the beetle. But why would it trigger now?”
Freyja, the only one of them who had been allowed to keep any weaponry, hefts her sword