I opened the trump to my house and got Delwin and Merlin through. Flora maintained the contact from the other side so I could be free to do what I needed to do without having to call someone back. Also, Vialle decided she needed to go get a couple of the great swords out of storage before she would be willing to evac. So we left the passage open for her to get through when she was done.

Between attending to Delwin and Merlin I threw some basic armor through so whoever wanted to, could use it. Not as good as plate, but a damn sight better than a nightshirt. I’m going to have to do some experimentation on materials and chemicals to see what works in amber and what doesn’t. Delwin looked worse, so I got him stabilized first. Merlin mostly looked like whatever he’s taken a face full of melted the skin. I patched what I could and left the rest to his shape shifting and Amber constitution.

While this was going on I had people knocking at the door, so to get rid of them before I left the boys I answered it. There were 3 messengers with notes from different low-level dragons asking about establishing some sort of alliance. Like I had time for that now. I took the messages and closed the door. Time to head back to Amber.

Vialle has decided that she doesn’t want to evac. Hey, I tried. We close the trump and head out in the hall where the fight has moved. There are some really fast bugs people are fighting. I do what I can by mind blasting them when I can get them in sight. Bleys has decided to come through in the library, so I pull his card and send some blasts his way at random times just to keep him off balance.

The fight moves into the library. Bleys has been busy, he’s found Doombringer and done some deal making on my world. He has trumped in a dragon named Ghostwalker. Flora throws Michael a trump of Nebbleherr (why do I feel cheated? – not like he’s MY dragon or anything). Corwin takes on Bleys and Nebble takes on Ghost. Both are outmatched, Nebble much more so than Corwin. While Ghost is busy beating up Nebble, Julian goes in and sticks a magic eating sword in his side, and gets tail bashed into a wall for his trouble. Archi is heading in to assist Corwin, but Bleys stops this by having all his remaining troops attack Archi. Ghost manages to lose both eyes due to attacks from the peanut gallery – I’m pretty sure one is an arrow from Flora but have lost track of who took the other. Michael maybe? Ghost advances on where he remembers Julian to be, strikes out and misses. This time. I get my ass down there to gain touch advantage and mentally convince him that Julian has gotten behind him. Ghost smashes most of Archie’s attackers with tail strikes. Nebble recovers enough to finish taking Ghost down. Meanwhile, Archi has gotten hamstrung by Julian’s attackers and is having trouble getting to Corwin’s aid. I grab the sword out of Ghost and head over to prop him up. We get over towards the fight and try to distract Bleys, but are not enough of a threat. I swing Kingbreaker, but don’t score and Bleys breaks it with Doombringer. (Ooops! Hope that sword wasn’t that important!) Vialle end up saving the day by brining in her magic marbles from her sculpting room. They hurl themselves under Bleys’s feet, tripping him and giving Corwin his shot. The family tries not to kill eachother when one of them goes off the deep end (there would be only a few left!), but in this case there didn’t seem to be an alternative. Fortunatly for us, Doombringer had sucked so much power from Bleys that his death curse held little power. In addition, at the very end his mind cleared and he tried to change the target to the Serpent. Might as well curse an avalanch.

With the combat mostly over, I called back to Delwin and Merlin to let them know. Delwin was awake, but said Merlin looked bad, so I headed over there. Merlin needed hospitalization. When I checked on him a few days later, he was doing better, however a lot of blood and tissue samples had been taken. Seems there was a market for amberites flesh. I pulled him out right away and made a stink about it. Hestabe acted shocked and apologized profusely for such a thing. I let her know that having Amberite samples could be dangerous. Like anyone but dragons would know to be interested. I hired some deckers to wipe out the information, but they were all prevented from doing their job. I tried to be nice, but they wouldn’t let me. I sat down and went to work. Suddenly, the probability of hard drive failures, or other computer destroying accidents, on machines that had Merlin’s test results skyrocketed. When Merlin recovered, we did a spell following the magical connection between an individual and his blood to set fire to or cause spillage of the samples (the Chaosian component of his blood made that not so unlikely as it first seems). I then went after back-up copies by increasing the chance of a fire in buildings containing disks or printed copies. Merlin was amused at the lengths I was going to in order to wipe out the samples. I explained that it wasn’t just wiping out the samples, it was a power play that needed to be countered. I don’t know if I got them all or not, but I hit it as hard as I could and know I must have gotten a good percentage.