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[indent][indent][indent][color=gray][sub][right][color=92278f][b]Location:[/b][/color] The Dungeon -- The City-State of Thorinn, Aetheria[/right][/sub][/color]
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Seele proceeded cautiously, keeping within the flickering pool of light cast by Kazuki’s torch. It was a silly thing, really, for someone like her to be even mildly afraid of the dark—someone with a literal affinity for it, who was also, allegedly, an adult. But she couldn’t help it, it’d been that way since she was a little girl, and the only thing that had changed was that now she was better at pretending it didn’t faze her as much. 

Suddenly, something [i]snapped[/i] behind the group and filled the dark room with a horrid, echoey grinding. Someone shrieked and jolted like a startled cat. 

It was Seele.

She quickly clapped a hand over her own mouth, and her brief flash of surprise devolved into embarrassed giggling. Oh gosh, she’d actually just done that. What a way to inspire confidence in the others.

Before she could apologize however, there came the familiar croaking of goblin voices from…the walls? From somewhere that wasn’t right here, charging at them, which was abnormally strange for the earlier mobs. 

Quickly, though, she understood why. As the room’s sinister designs revealed themselves in a flurry, Seele’s mind raced for answers. She made to run through her spells but—no console? Was this part of the apparent glitch? [i]Shoot.[/i] But she knew her spells at least, she’d been doing this long enough, and the first thing that came to her was simple, and disconcerting.

She had no answer for this. 

But that was fine. She didn’t have the answer to most of Pariah’s problems, that wasn’t how she played the game. She didn’t make the plays, she helped other people make the plays. If there was a way out of this, then the best thing she could do was make it easier for her team to find it. 

Seele straightened up and took stock of her allies. [color=92278f]“I think I can handle the ceiling,”[/color] she said, and with a flair of her sleeves she brought her wrists up parallel to each other. Chains coalesced from the dark, sloughing off shadows for ghostly violet light, and in the work of an umbral moment, her hands were bound. 

The effects were immediate, she felt [i]weaker,[/i] even more so than she usually did when the shackles were summoned. This was strange. This was worrying. 

This was not the time for doubt. 

One by one she angled her shackled hands to her allies and snapped her claw-ringed fingers. The tinny din of the metal was different this time, its echo a warble of arcane devilry. Light shimmered around each of them in turn, and though it took a few moments, soon enough most of them had been surrounded by a faint shell of violet, which just as quickly faded out of sight, only to flicker back into being if struck. The shields were not very strong, but they also weren’t very expensive. The drain Seele felt from each cast, she knew, was more from the effect of the shackles than the cost of the shields. 

Cracks formed in the chains between her wrists, leaking iridescent vapors to the floor. She threw buffs to a few them, negligible and quickly vanishing thanks to the shackles, but they did their jobs. After several moments of focused casting—a luxury she didn’t often get—the chains suddenly shattered into mist.
[color=#2E2C2C]…Mis…sy…[/color]
Now she did [i]not[/i] feel weak. 

Another round of metal snaps brought new shields to a few of them—not many, she couldn’t afford to do too much lest she run herself empty or break the phase. Darker, almost void-like, only to be sucked away back to Seele an instant later as she brought one hand up towards the ceiling. 
[color=#2E2C2C]…please…[/color]
A dome appeared around the few of them who had stayed towards the back, and with some effort its shape changed, becoming more taller, narrower. It connected with the descending ceiling, and she felt an uncanny pressure within herself as the spikes met the shimmering, abyssal light. Truthfully, she didn’t know if it would hold for long, or if it would even hold at all, but the best she could do right now was try. 
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