Yeah, I feel like a huge jerk for ever doubting Cags now. 
They’re in such a precarious position now. Hopefully they can escape somehow, I mean, Cags can still teach her even if he doesn’t have the title, right?
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Yes, but seeing what the Calgistro and the magic community as a whole are aware of… aren’t there laws of some kind preventing our magics from being revealed?
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I mean Marty is ACTIVELY trying to shine a light here.
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New email from Lauren
Please don’t shut me out.
There has to be another way.
I see you on a train somewhere, prayer flags passing by your window and you’re wondering if it’s the last time you’ll ever see that color gold again. I don’t hear your thoughts. I feel them. Like they’re mine. I can’t control it, even if I wanted to. I don’t want to hurt you but what you feel and think are mixed with my own senses, like there’s no difference.
You said yourself, aside from the Cagliostros you’ve never known anyone like me. We can change this together but you have to respond.
Yours,
Lauren
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Guys. Guys. Holy crap, I got a message back from Marty!
I thought you were nuts until his assistant wrote back. Never thought he’d bite but here we are.
So how the hell did you know I was gonna get the invite?
I gotta say, you toss around the word “magic” like the last group of people calling themselves the Mountaineers didn’t get blown to the six corners twenty years ago.
Yeah. I’m a journalist for crying out loud. I know who you are, and I knew them too, back in the days of dialup. We worked together, but they were more ballsy about it. And when they went sniffing where you’ve been sniffing they got their noses swatted.
But if you’re committed to digging in, maybe we can be of use to each other down the road.
I’ll see if I can’t answer some of your questions. Give me time to go through my files.
He knew the Mountaineers…holy crap.
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Is this part with being blown up to six corners a common saying? Or does that mean, that the old Mountaineers tried or watched the same “performance” in a room with six corners, like Cag is trying to repeat??
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Just reading that gave me an adrenaline rush. He might be able to answer our questions about what happened to the 84 Mountaineers!! Oh my goodness!!
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Nice job @Revenir ! This is one of the greatest leads we’ve gotten in all this time. An actual, live person with knowledge of what’s gone on who could talk to us.
And no @Crytter I’ve never heard the term ‘blown to the six corners’ before. That did seem odd.
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Cags responded to Lauren:
There’s nothing to be done, Lauren. You were born with the gift of telemancy. I was born with the gift of foreknowledge. I have seen my life unfold as I have always known it would. Now I see nothing but the welcoming dark. My time is at an end. I have accepted it.
But if you will indulge me, I would like to test our combined power, and your keen senses. My finale “trick”, The Translation, is an object that was constructed in the time of Menkaure. It is a towering tetrahedron engraved with bestial symbols. I have been in possession of its ten parts for centuries, but the conjuration which I’ve collected through the ages remains incomplete.
The result of my partial efforts is dazzling to be sure: the wall between our world and that of the dead crumble around the assembled icon, allowing contact from the beyond. It makes for a rousing finale but I have never unlocked the object’s full potential, or true purpose. There is an aspect of it within my reach, but I have yet been unable to grasp it.
Perhaps together we can solve its final secret and give the performance of a lifetime. Of many lifetimes. Or at the least you can continue my work when I am gone.
Give me this gift.
Don’t dwell on what we cannot change.
Let us focus on what we can do.
Magic.
Ohhhh - I think Cags might be talking about our fragment pieces - a tetrahedron engraved with bestial symbols. If Cags has the pieces though, how is the book getting them as well??
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Double post but multiple responses:
From Lauren:
I’ll do whatever you ask me to do, but respectfully, if you think I’m not going to try everything in my power to change this, you’re mistaken.
And I have more power than I ever imagined.
I flew tonight. I had to stop sitting here waiting to hear from you. I had to get out of the loft. So I decided I’d learn to fly. Not levitate. Not some cheap casting. I bent my own blood and conjured wings. Massive black wings like some kind of dragon, and I flew out into the city, skimmed the surface of the Hudson. I looped the Brooklyn Bridge. So don’t doubt that when I set my mind to saving you, you’ll be saved.
You haven’t accepted anything. Your sadness invades me. Or I’m invading you I guess. I flew so fast tonight that your thoughts, your pain, the music and sounds, you saying goodbyes to color and honey, it was all drowned out by the wind. And I have never felt so alone. A mile above the city, carried by my own body and all I wanted was to come back here and be inside your fear with you. Save you from it.
The magician’s journal. The Monarch Papers.
Oh my God.
He wrote about a spell he created that could protect against magic. He said he used it to lock “her” away from it and it from her. He said it’s fragile but it seems like it was successful. Enough that he hid the work somewhere so no one could find it.
Could that be the start? Could we use that as a base to protect you from the people controlling you? Could we really hide you from magic? Or it from you?
I’ve been wasting time. I’ll solve his riddles. I’ll find his work. I’ll break it apart and rebuild it. Make it bulletproof. I’ll conjure him from the grave if I have to.
This isn’t over yet.
From Cags:
Bending blood is not for the inexperienced. You could have died up there without me.
This isn’t what I want. Yes. I fear what is to come. The moment when this soul is taken from me.
But to bar me from magic would be worse than my fate. I’ve seen works like this. They blind those who do not know and they crush the memories of those who do. I have lived too glorious a life to treat it as if none of it mattered. I was a shining light and I would die before diminishing.
You are too gifted to waste your power trying to save me.
From Lauren:
We’d learn magic together. I would remember.
From Cags:
But I wouldn’t believe you.
I shipped the last piece of The Translation this morning. It will arrive on Tuesday.
Goodnight Lauren.
Faithfully yours,
AC
I guess Tuesday is the day we will get the next part of the puzzle, then hopefully we can solve it and beat them to the Morgan Library.
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Huh. So, we need to find the book before Laureen does. I don’t know if we have what we need yet.
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I’m guessing that whatever Cags sent will tell us where to find the book. I think we have to (sadly) wait until Tuesday.
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They’re going to steal his soul? Man, what kind of evil organization is this? 
There’s got to be some way we can save him, a spell we can perform or something… I don’t want to give up on this guy. 
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It kills me to say it but… How can we help? Cloak and Dagger cast aside this is an innocent life, one bound together by magic and purity, this man needs our help. I’m sure the Gossmere will stand with me on this (The Few of us there are) but I’m begging the other guilds to see reason. It may be he is just as aware of us as Marty was! If Lauren has the power to bind herself and sense other minds, what stops her from feeling our presence? The sake of hiding is no longer worth it. This is our chance to do good outside the fragments…
We have a bigger part to play.
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I’m not sure we know how to help. We know nothing if his arangement, who it’s with, or what we’re up against.
If you’d like to bring guilds unto it. Speaking as a Balamorian. Everyone who lives, dies. He’s not special in that regard. And if he’s been performing magic for ‘decades’ as he says then he’s lives a good, long life that he seems to have rather enjoyed. Not everyone is blessed with knowing their end date and gets to have time to make their goodbyes and amends either. He even seems to want to go out on his terms rather then have his memory wiped. Subverting his will against his wishes is more repulsive to me then letting him die, honestly.
Now, I’m not a total jerk, nor am I dictator. While we probably can’t help him. We do have a choice. And we should take that choice seriously.
If we let Laureen find the book, and let her tear apart it’s magic and rebind it to him to ‘protect’ him. Then his life would carry on in some fashion. The cost of doing that is probably giving up our chance to fufill Sullivan’s deepest wishes and let his daughter see the truth of the world.
And while I normall am all for reasoning things out, I doubt ‘reasoning with Laureen’ is an option. If Caglostro, her mentor and quite possibly love can’t talk her out of doing anything, whatever the cost, to save him, I doubt we have a snowball’s chance in hell.
That’s just my two cents. I say we help Sullivan and Deidre and unfortunately that probably means not helping Laureen. If everyone else would rather choose another path, I’m up for talking about it.
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I would say to do just that, the only issue is that… Were we meant to? If we try will it do anything? I value life as much as the next guy, but Cags said he can basically see the future and that he saw the end of his life. I don’t know if that means we aren’t meant to try, or we do try and it doesn’t work out. Either way, it sounds like a lost cause, unless we can somehow change the future or there is some other option. I dunno, maybe I’m thinking too much with my brain and not with my heart.
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What about this.
We obtain the book, for its resources are too precious to loose and I understand that. However, we work WITH Lauren to find a magic to change his fate. Without changing his being.
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I think that may work. We have to be very careful though, she may be mad at us for taking the book.
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I’m on the fence about this matter. But, if people felt really compelled to help Cags then I’d say we must first focus on our task of getting the book and helping Deirdre.
Once we’ve done that, then we can see what we can do to help Cags. We should be getting the last part on Tuesday, then hopefully we can solve it quickly and get the book from the Morgan Library on Wednesday or Thursday, see what’s inside, etc. and then perhaps talk to Lauren. We don’t want to tip them off or let them know we are after the book until it is securely in our hands. We know that Cags should be okay until the 31st, so we still have time, should we choose to try and save them.
Though I should also add, if this organization that Cags is apart of can kill him/her, a clearly powerful magician, what can it do to us or Lauren? Who’s to say it won’t kill Cags anyway after we save him/her from this particular fate? Something to consider…
A big one for me is - are we willing to risk our safety and the safety of people like Cole and Deirdre to save Cagliostro, a complete stranger who has seemingly lived a long life and accepted their fate as inevitable?
Just my opinions and some food for thought.
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Agreed, Lauren can not be warned. She would kill us before she allowed us to take that book. However, I personally feel strongly an effort must be made to save the Calgistro, or at least ease the pain of Laurens loss. I don’t think we should just get this book to help Deidre, I adore her, but other powers are at play.
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