[centre][h2]Morgana Faith[/h2][/centre]

[color=c4df9b]“Anywhere out of the way is fine. Just clear the area for me please.”[/color]

The process of clearing out the crates went quickly and smoothly even with just Faye doing the work, the Fae’s teleportation magic making swift work of something that would take her much, much longer. Even with magic it would have taken Morgana a long time to move those crates, needing to create a separate ritual for each one, accounting for distance, position, weight and size; it would have been simpler to move everything by hand. But it was easy for Faye, in a way that was honestly quite vexing to witness; even more so when she confidently stated that she would be able to trace the teleportation ritual back to its source, since that was something that Morgana simply [i]could not[/i] do. Magic or not.

So many advantages; Fae blood was exceedingly potent.

As was demonic.

When Amanda’s assistant, or whatever she was, arrived to perform her exorcism ritual Morgana couldn’t help but stop what she was doing to watch. The crime scene would still be there in a few minutes after all and it wasn’t every day that one got to see a demon open a door to the underworld. Morgana made sure to make a note of it all, even raising her glove to her eye again to witness the magic being woven together for a moment, before the sight of it began to make her throb in a painless but worrying manner. She wondered how much of the spectacle was truly necessary; the chanting, repeated three times, a magically significant number, the runes, not written in chalk or any other substance, but conjured into the air itself, the wine, cast to the ground as an offering to some higher power, perhaps a symbolic substitute for blood not unlike how it was used in Eucharist rites to symbolise the blood of Christ. It was a fascinatingly archaic display that Morgana found somewhat quaint.

Her own focus on research was often to remove such superstitions from the act of casting, or to determine how much they really mattered; were it a human casting in such a way she would have rolled her eyes at the waste of effort and a good vintage, but since it was a demon…

It was foolish to compared demonic rituals to that or human, as foolish as comparing her own magic to Faye’s or that of a dragon’s. The magic of demons tended to be somewhat theological in nature, the kind of practice that called somewhat on the power of a higher being in order to work; beyond that she didn’t know much more. Needless to say, Morgana didn’t spend much time researching that kind of magic; she was part of the department of heretical studies after all and [i]higher[/i] beings such as these tended to be a little annoyed if you skipped out on the ceremonial aspects of casting.

Spoilsports.

Nonetheless, even if all of the effort involved was somewhat impractical it allowed the practitioners to call on that much more power than they would be able to with just their own strength; there was a benefit to it. But of course, even without that demon’s had enough natural magical strength to be able to cast greater magical rituals such as this without even the need to scribble a hasty circle around themselves. A demon like Madeleine would have been able to open a long distance teleportation spell given the correct knowledge, no doubt; such a creature would have been one of her candidates for who was responsible had they not found evidence of a human ritual.

Speaking of which; with the show over Morgana turned her attention back to proceedings, focusing her attention back on the remains of the teleportation ritual now that Faye had cleared out the crates for her. It was, as she had expected, partially destroyed. Not intentionally as far as she could tell, though she was sure whoever had run this place would have cleared everything away before they left had they the chance. No, the ritual was damaged simply because people had been dragging heavy crates along the floor, scuffing the chalk and wiping away faint traces of magical circles and patterns. It was enough for her to work with however, so she got to work pacing around the circle and examining what she could.

Whoever had drawn this seemed to mostly be drawing on European influences for their work, which was not surprising given where they were, but there were also some influences from other cultures thrown in their as well; particularly the Middle East, whose influence on mathematics during the Golden Age of Islam had introduced several significant additions to magical theory as well. Morgana was tempted to say that the combination spoke of an international group, or a particularly well educated individual among their number, but there was another clue as well. The European influences were specifically Greek in nature, old influences at that; there were some traces of more modern ritual formulas, particularly Germanic matrices in the stabilising elements, but the bulk of the work was Greek formulas from a time predating the rise of the Roman Empire. Whoever designed this was using old knowledge, primarily.

[color=c4df9b]“Hmm.”[/color]

Beyond that the circle was not large, but that was due more to the compactness of the design than anything to do with the scale involved; the ritual patterns were drawn in layers, different formulas and calculations and stabilising elements piled on top of each other in a way that Morgana could not help but admire. Most of the fine detail was worn away, but she could still tell that the circle had spaces for seven practitioners to work in concert with each other; seven was another magically significant number, though with how many schools of thought there were in the world it was hard to find a number was [i]wasn’t[/i] magically significant to someone or another. Three for the trinity in Europe, four for death in Japan, seven for luck in many cultures and eight for the same in China, nine simply because it was three times three and three, as she had already said, was the trinity; at those were just the ones off the top of her head.

[color=c4df9b]“I have everything I need for now. I’ll need to do some more research later, but I don’t believe the person who designed this ritual had any kind of formalised education in magic; not one from this millennium at least.”[/color] What that meant for their investigation she didn’t know yet, which was why she needed to look into this more. She would need to do some digging into the history books, try and find an organisation or faction that eschewed modern teachings or who clung to the old ways. Alternatively they were looking for an individual who had been hired by this organisation to create this ritual, a freelancer who happened to specialise in ancient magics. [color=c4df9b]“Faye, your turn to do whatever it is you do with that portal.”[/color]