We're Here To Talk About Your Car's Extended Warranty...

[Miriam Bell]

"I wouldn't go by 'Miri' if you were carving my forehead with a knife." Miriam scoffs at Wyldclay. "And I'll only blame you a little bit since we're the ones who fed you this bad influence." she adds with a bit more of a smirk in Will's direction.

[Will Stanton]

"I think he's livened up the place with his wit and charm," Will said, diplomatically, as he went to draw a 'Sam' on the ogre's forehead.

[Samantha McManus]

"Writing on our foreheads rather seems to be avoiding the real issue."

[Will Stanton]

"And that would be...getting out? Because we can take you right there right now, if you want."

[Miriam Bell]

"More the fact that people can be mistaken in the first place."

[Will Stanton]

"Well, I'm not god. I am fallible, occasionally," Will smiled. "I think the machines would have sorted you out, Miriam, and let us know something was up. Sam here..." he said, trailing off.

"Sam rings a little truer to us. Which is odd, when you think about it. Maybe it's something we'll have to work on, in future." Wyldclay added.

[Miriam Bell]

"I've spent half my life struggling to avoid this kind of diluting of my Self. Suppose it's different when it's counteracted by a billion years of memories."

[Will Stanton]

"This is really more...additive,' Will agreed. "Filling in missing pieces of a puzzle, rather than watering down what was already there."

[Samantha McManus]

"Speaking of, how do I return your ogre?"

[Will Stanton]

This triggered some debate between the Wills.

"Ah....hrm. You know, that's a good question," Will said, frowning. "If it were just two of us, we wouldn't bother; we blend together in the pot, after all. But I think you've firmly established that you'd prefer not to join the covenant of the clay. Dr. Bowen, I'm sure, would have some suggestions, but that's not really an option now."

"We could try the old woman who swallowed a fly trick," Wyldclay suggested.

"That didn't exactly work out well for her."

"Well, that's because she didn't have any horse-sense. We're a little better than that, don't you think?"

"Perhaps it'll just come out when she returns to flesh and blood?"

"You know what happened last time one of us got pulled out of one of them all Willy-Nilly."

"Won't happen this time; we've got a little more experience now. Besides, the other parts of it were good for us, if you remember correctly."

"Lost some of the toxic masculinity in the procedure, sure. And it is, after all, so difficult to entirely un-mix clay."

"But we can pull bits and pieces out of the cauldron, both from our own choice and from the desires of those reaching in. Maybe we take her out that way?"

"What, and just think non-Ogrey thoughts as we manually pull the Morrigan out? Sure. There's such a difference between a war goddess and a muscle-bound behemoth. You do it wrong, and you'll get the meekest irishwoman on the planet, and Nemain takes up permanent residence in the gumbo. Not ideal for anyone, there."

"And your idea?"

"Pug mill and a vacuum?"

"Avoiding that sort of thing is how they got into this mess in the first place."

"Yeah, by being a big baby about it."

"No judgement; people are allowed to be weird in their own ways. She may not be a monoform, but she's not exactly one of us either. She's somewhere in between."

"We could go for a curse?"

"A curse."

"Something thaumaturgical, with one of the tools from the archive. Perhaps the Vessel of Transference?"

"If I remember correctly, that's for swapping out someone's blood. That's a terrible idea."

"Alright, the Cleansing of the Flesh, then. Or the Platonic Split"

"It's an ogre, not a disease. And you can't do that last one; you need a Methuselah."

"So we find a Methuselah."

"Hard pass. Maybe we just take them back to flesh-and-blood, and get the Will parts to transform into something she can remove."

"Yes, because it's easier to split a flesh-and-blood creature than it is to split clay."

"It's easier to split a Will from a Sam than it is to split a Will from a Will, surely? And she's a shifter herself; she can split into crows."

"You're hoping maybe she splits into a bunch of crows and one Ogre?"

"Well, hope is what we have right now; this isn't exactly something precedented."

"I think that's just how you get ogress crows, which sounds like a lot of fun, but not what the Morrigan is asking for."

"I still think we're back to physical manual separation. That or a chemical separation, and we don't actually know if that would work."

"We don't know if your idea would work! We're dealing with a mythological creature and also an ogre. This is something solved by magic."

"A concoction, then. Something we can whip up. Eat me, drink me, that whole bit."

"That'd take time."

"And then we're back to just reaching in and pulling her out, if we want to do something immediately."

"Or the pug mill. The Morrigan is, after all, a good screw."

"Or we take time and brew something."

"Or we get help and do the Ritual of Sundering next waxing crescent moon. But I thought you wanted this done now."


The two continued to bandy suggestions back and forth, with no clear sign of stopping.

[Miriam Bell]

Miriam makes a couple attempts at interrupting the back and forth but keeps getting distracted by trying to figure out what the hell they're even talking about, causing her expression to increasingly slide to somewhere between 'Are you kidding me right now!?' and 'Can you believe these two?'

"Hey!" she finally snaps in, repeating herself with a loud snap of her finger. "Hey! Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum! Why don't you show me the way out and I can try pulling Sam out. If it doesn't work, I'll shove her back in and you can continue whatever this is."

[Will Stanton]

Tweedledee and Tweedledum looked down at Miriam, nonplussed. They glanced at one another, seemingly having a private moment.

"Let me take our guest to the exit," Will said to Wyldclay after a moment. "And you can keep working here with Sam to see what she wants to do."

He ushered Miriam out through the door opposite to where Sam and Miriam had entered.

[Samantha McManus]

"I'll... ah... keep an eye out for a giant hand, I suppose."

"But this better not awaken anything in me."

[Miriam Bell]

"Okay, I get it." Miriam says as she's being lead to the door, feeling and sounding kind of bitter. "This is some mystical shapeshifter thing. I'll leave you two or three or five or whatever to it then." Is she being unfair, almost certainly. Does that stop her from slamming the door behind her on the way out because she's feeling jealous, pushed out and insecure? Most certainly not.

[Wyll Wyldclay]

"I'll... ah... keep an eye out for a giant hand, I suppose."

"But this better not awaken anything in me."

"I think the giant hand's actually pretty good, and well within normal-person parameters.

You should see what it's like when she's using the cauldron as a hot tub; apparently, it's like an eclipse," the Wyldclay grinned.

[Samantha McManus]

"Well good luck with that now that you've gotten her in that mood."

[Will Stanton]

"Okay, I get it." Miriam says as she's being lead to the door, feeling and sounding kind of bitter. "This is some mystical shapeshifter thing. I'll leave you two or three or five or whatever to it then." Is she being unfair, almost certainly. Does that stop her from slamming the door behind her on the way out because she's feeling jealous, pushed out and insecure? Most certainly not.

Will walked Miriam in the opposite direction from where they entered, leading her to a small room with a raised pedestal at one end and a skylight directly above. "In the future, if you get stuck down here again, you can come right to this room," he explained to her. "This is where we go to get out through the 'main' entrance, the cauldron. You should be able to come right here and get out without having to worry about anyone else bothering you."

"This should work automatically," he continued. "Though, to be on the safe side, you should probably think some Miriam-y thoughts on your way out."

"I'll give you a boost this time, though again, you shouldn't need one." He led Miriam to the pedestal and had her stand on it, and then walked behind her. "On three. One, two..."

Miriam was tossed *upward*, shot as if out of a cannon up, through the skylight into the air, towards the unnatural lighting of her own dorm room. She tumbled and spiraled up, gradually encountering more and more resistance until it was less flying and more climbing, getting more and more buoyant, until she broke through the surface of the clay, hanging over the edge of the cauldron.

Her flesh-and-blood body seemed to be intact, even if it took a moment for her to remember, oh yeah, we have to breathe now. Her telepathy kicked back in at full power, too, no longer muffled by being submerged in the clay. The table in front of her had the bag of crullers that she -- no, that Will, it was Will, of course it was -- had brought back from work. And, according to the clock, she had been gone for maybe five minutes.

[Wyll Wyldclay]

"Well good luck with that now that you've gotten her in that mood."

"Well, she made a point of calling you the girlfriend, which makes us chopped liver, I suppose. Stress brings out the truth at times, does it not?

Let's step outside; she won't actually be able to grab you in here, not fully. The citadel is sort of protected, to prevent someone from taking one of us Paragons out."

[Miriam Bell]

Falling upwards into the air is disorienting to say the least, so who can blame the former vampire for forgetting to breathe and having a brief moment of panic when her chest begins hurting and forcefully reminds her to take a breath. Stupid Will and their stupid crullers and their stupid connection to Sam and the common ground of turning into stupid stuff they share. She stomps over to the couch and angrily grabs one of the pastries to stuff in her mouth between huffs. She'll let them stew for a while, which might take a while considering time apparently flows differently down there. Of course it does, everything there runs on Will-logic and she's definitely not upset about the fact that she still struggles to get it. Must be Will's fault cause it can't possibly be her hang-up about losing herself to the thoughts of others.

'A weak and insecure emotional basis can make it hard to affirm your own thoughts. If you don't like who you are then--' She interrupts the memory of her counselor at Muir running through her head by grabbing a throw-pillow from next to her and launching it across the room in accordance with it's name. The fact that it's a Will helps only for a moment. She's found her own way to make it work and throw up barriers, this just happened because she's let herself open up too much lately. Will and Sam ruined her mental defenses by being so... so... nice. Which she definitely doesn't deserve.

[Samantha McManus]

"Look, I realize I probably deal with Miriam's neuroses a bit more than you do, but you don't have to be a little shit about it," she grumbles as she steps 'outside.'

"So this should happen any moment now, right?"

[Wyll Wyldclay]

"Any minute now, yeah," Wyldclay said, shielding their eyes some as they looked up, waiting for Miriam.

"Honestly, you might be fine just going up the normal way; you've got some Bouba in you, or something close. We're assuming you won't be able to shed the ogre, but that's just an assumption."

They pointedly did not respond to Sam's jab about Miriam's neuroses.

[Miriam Bell]

It takes a bit longer than perhaps anticipated but after a couple minutes Miriam's face appears up in the 'sky', followed soon by her comparatively giant hand reaching down in search for Sam.

[Samantha McManus]

Miriam does get a sense that Sam's in there, though it's somewhat... muddied? In both a metaphorical and almost a literal sense. It's tempting to see everything in Will's realm in terms of clay, but it almost feel like trying to get one color of Play-Doh out of a ball some child has enthusiastically mashed.

Still, she does finally manage to get a grip on Sam, and bits of ogre start to drip off and coalesce as Miriam lifts her labels-are-dumb-and-we're-going-to-fight-about-it from the morass.

Though even those, as they start to gather and take shape again, don't seem exactly unchanged.

"...this feels bloody weird, but I guess that's about normal for today."

[Narrator]

It's an odd sight, a giant hand reaching down from the heavens above. Sam doesn't spend much time shrunken as a shifter; that's not how she works, so it's likely a new experience for her.

What is also a new experience is being sort of sucked up. Because it's not a case of Miriam's hand reaching the city below, rummaging around until she grabbed Sam like a doll and tugged her out. Instead, as it passed a certain level in the sky, there's a *tug* on Sam; a *pull* on her clay form, stretching her out and sending her floating up. There's a pull here, as Miriam's mental desires of just what Will she wanted reverberated through the clay, and in this case, the Will she wanted was Sam. And she wanted a Sam that wasn't an ogre, so some of those bits of dimwitted fanged muscle dripped out, pooling on the ground below.

But it wasn't just Sam -- bits and pieces of other Wills, dotted around the landscape, also floated up, twisting together with Sam, as the clayscape did it's best to fulfill Miriam's wants. And, Sam had been right earlier -- there was more than a couple versions of her wandering around down here, and bits and pieces of that were coming up, too, as Sam started to gather and take shape, being pulled through the clay and then out, full-sized in the room once more.

[Miriam Bell]

"Well, you look okay." Miriam mutters as she steps back, giving Sam room to climb out, though her posture is definitely stand-offish.

[Samantha McManus]

And indeed, since Miriam does have a fairly firm mental image of Sam, what she pulls out is more or less exactly what she expects. A slightly wet Sam, sputtering as she climbs out and lands on her hands and knees.

Then, in the process of a coughing fit, the back of Sam's shirt tears. Her form wavering, then growing at the expense of her wardrobe. She lands just north of seven feet of muscle, brutish and tusked.

[Miriam Bell]

"Or not." she says, taking another step back. She doesn't really think Sam's going to be as violent as this form suggests but giving the erupting ogre some space doesn't seem like a bad idea. "Please tell me you've just taking a liking to looking like this..."

[Samantha McManus]

"Give me a bloody second," she huffs, finally pulling herself upright.

"Well that's... less than ideal. Could've sworn I saw all of her dripping away as you pulled me out..."

[Miriam Bell]

"Well, the experts are right in there, I'm sure they'll get you sorted with one of their dozens of ideas."

[Samantha McManus]

"Are we really doing this, right now? I didn't have both you and Will being cross with me on my card today."

[Miriam Bell]

"What? I'm clearly no help here. I had one idea and it didn't work. But hey, if you need me to come with to snap at them again and make things worse, sure, happy to be of service."

[Samantha McManus]

"And if you ask two Wills a question, apparently you get five hundred different answers."

[Miriam Bell]

"They've never wanted for options. Besides, what else are you going to do? Go take new passport photos?"

[Samantha McManus]

"I don't know, okay? I'm really not sure they know either. I know I'm too bloody tired to sort out what they were saying and which bits are good or bollocks."

[Miriam Bell]

"They're all bollocks! And they probably all work whether or not it makes sense to anybody else, cause it's Will!" she huffs.

[Samantha McManus]

"Aye well, Will's pretty good with a hammer, but I'm not so sure I'm a nail."

[Miriam Bell]

"Out here we're not. In there I'm not so sure."

[Samantha McManus]

"Plus I think repeated exposure to various Morrigans has baked Will's noodle."

[Miriam Bell]

"I don't even know what that means."

[Samantha McManus]

"You didn't notice they were kind of giving me the hard sell, there?"