You keep going. It's not that exhausting at walking pace, but it does take a while until the walled city of Vranhal is visible. A lot more walking, and you can make out the shapes of guards on the lamp-lit walls.

A telepathic message reaches your mind.

Hail, traveler.


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Adele: "There are a good number of anti-magic techniques. Telepathy-based methods involve leeching mana from the spell, cutting the tendril, forcing the spell to activate prematurely, or implanting a different spell into the tendril that overwrites or activates along with the existing one. Those are all precision-methods, for the most part.

Area methods, one is creating weak corruption fields - enough to scramble any spells that enter and gets fed the leftover mana, but not strong enough to harm a person. Might kill some insects. Alteration fields are theoretically possible, but I've never heard of something like that.

Gate shamans and skilled chaos mages can create weak partial-gates that become complete gates in the location where they receive mana - ends up being a large field that obliterates tendrils and magic sequences, and any mana that is attempted to be transferred around, into a spell or outside source or whatever, is simply eaten by the gate. Any magic artifacts that enter the partial-gate area release all their mana at once in a burst. These gates, like the weak corruption fields, are for the most part too weak to cause direct harm to people.

Precision anti-magic is what you'll deal with for the most part when fighting organized magic users, though you'll definitely run into fancier methods that are used by constructs.

I guess negation is anti-magic, too. Prevents gates from forming, eats magic sequences."


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Byrnolf: "Do we need it? I don't imagine a turtle spirit is going to hijack the thing. I mean, well, yeah it'll do that, but we kinda want that to happen. I don't think we're particularly worried about saboteurs or whatever. Your regular doll doesn't have construct security either, though it probably uses the natural spirit for that. Channeling through the heartstone or something like that."


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YOU BURN STAMINA TO SQUAT MORE

YOU THINK WATER IS HEAVY

MONK RETURNS

Monk: "Hey, the lord said we can get some gear from the armory. She's having some people dig around for construct stuff, too."

Lord Elizabeth Hopluit. The gate is open if you wish to come in, someone can lead you to the lord or another official if you wish.


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Byrnolf: "Ah, alright. Gimme a moment."

He takes a few moments, doing some magicky thing or another.

Byrnolf: "Alright, put some security on it. I suppose you want me to leave it inactive until you get the spirit in?"


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Adele: I'll have to show you a few things, too.
Exiting the armory and the decoy armory, Adele seals the painting door and the two of you head back up stairs and out back to the yard again.

Adele: "What's first? Oh, I can call for someone experienced in antimagic if you want some practice dealing with it."


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You follow Monk and she leads you out of the capital building and to... Baltir's workshop? The bolt maker guy.

Heading in, you see the old man with two sets of some sort of large construct framework, neatly disassembled and laid out on the floor of the shop.

The constructs look like they used to be cages or something.

Baltir: "Good, you two are here. I heard you two aren't much of mages, is that right?"

Monk: "I can kick up some kinetics, that's about it. I mostly hit stuff."

Baltir: "So you're not a mage, excellent. How would you like to wear some inverted anti-magic frames as armor?"

Monk: "Wait, so we'd be safe from magic?"

Baltir: "All but the most dangerous spells, or physical projectiles."