Meeting at the light

[Corwin]

"I'm sure a bunch of efreet nobles have country homes with decent defenses?"

[Ebiris]

"Oh, those kinds of dungeons," Alicia says dully. "Well yes they need to be dealt with too."

[Corwin]

"It's been a while since I did something impressive," Seira admits. "The dao didn't even ask anything of me, but they wanted that Abyssal Lake back. Maybe that's because I destroyed the adamantine mine I hit a while back instead of taking it for myself? Should I just seize more land like that across Fire and Earth?"

[Ebiris]

"If you have the resources to garrison it and it offers something useful. The Abyssal Lake is a fairly unique site, but regular mines are fairly common. If they want it back I'll make the sacrifice for peace so long as it furthers our overall aims for the conflict," Alicia volunteers. "I've already done enough with it."

[Corwin]

"Eh, to be honest I used the need to talk to you about it to drag out negotiations so I could run them in parallel with dao and efreet both. They still aren't offering enough for me to bite, although maybe some more aggressive negotiations will end up bearing fruit today? And come to think of it, I pretty much took all of the liquid adamantine from that mine anyway but never actually did anything with it. The efreet somehow animated it, which was pretty neat! A mile-long dragon of molten adamantine! I wish I could recruit the guy that came up with that one."

[Ebiris]

"We do come up with some talented enemies, don't we?" Alicia frowns, thinking of Jade and her tricks.

[Corwin]

"It can be very disheartening," Seira agrees. "All these incredibly talented and powerful people are just hiding themselves and wasting their talents. I like to imagine how much we could accomplish if enough people saw the value and self-gain in mutual cooperation."

[Ebiris]

"I'm sure the person who made a mile long adamantine dragon doesn't think their talents are being wasted. Right now they're probably working on making one that's two miles long," Alicia ventures with a little smile.

[Corwin]

An answering smile blossoms on Seira's face. "That sounds nice. Hey, if the efreet talks fall through want to attack the City of Brass with me? I know I talked about it at Zaaman Rul's before, but I'm actually serious."

[Ebiris]

"I'd want to get some serious intelligence as to what we'd be up against before risking that," Alicia says doubtfully. "I expect I'd have to fight at a level I can't sustain for very long and most everyone else who came along would have poor odds of surviving it."

[Corwin]

"We can do that. Our pal has informants there, so we could stop by after the talks and see what he knows."

[Anastasia]

We're just waiting to line up Moore now, just FYI, so this'll likely be closed soon and moved to a new topic.

[Anastasia]

New topic time. Locking this one.