PP3's Room of Old Ideas

After the bombing, Eveline led everyone back to Pringle Manor. Maine and Jonah arrived there too, stepping through the teleportation circle from Jericha without triggering the same strange feedback the first group had suffered. The Ex Force was whole again, though not exactly calm. News of goblin bombers in a pie shop was not the kind of local update anyone wanted to receive on arrival. Eveline brought them into a side room she trusted. It was quiet, dusty, and full of Percival Pringle III's old inventions. Leather furniture cracked under shifting weight. Half-shuttered windows let in soft light. The walls and shelves held relics from PP3's glory days like toys in a museum of irrelevance. There was a lint brush that changed clothing color for six seconds. A purple healing potion. A strange fork locked in a display. Old boots. A broken mirror cracked into uneven sections, with one piece missing. Jonah looked into the mirror first. He saw enough to know it was not ordinary. Some kind of magic was tied to it, not to one person but to a situation. He also noticed someone watching from outside the window. When the watcher realized Jonah had seen him, he vanished with impossible speed, the air and background moving against the direction of his escape. Nick looked too, but whatever he saw or understood, he played it off as a strange funhouse mirror. Maine found the fork. On the back was the word clink. When he said it and tapped the fork, it expanded into a trident. Another clink collapsed it back down. Maine quietly made sure no one outside the group was watching and pocketed it with the practiced dignity of someone stealing from a room full of abandoned inventions. They had come to Pringle Manor for dinner and a covert route to Stormcall. Instead, they found a room full of old ideas still capable of changing the story.