Although Angel did not know how the Pale Empress had described the cooperation between the Numinous Episcopate and her, the Spirit Medium's highly cooperative attitude offered some clues.
From her detailed account, Angel learned that the Numinous Episcopate's Royalist Faction had a three-person team hiding in Tizamo Town. It consisted of the captain, Pena, a Nightmare, and a Weapon Master. Since the last Dream Festival, they had settled in town under various pretexts. After a year, they had fully integrated into the community, so even somewhat unusual actions were unlikely to arouse suspicion.
This combination both surprised Angel and struck her as perfectly reasonable. The Spirit Medium had a special sensitivity to spirit bodies and undead spirits, while the Nightmare could actively enter other people's dreams, making both highly useful for investigating the truth behind the Dream Festival. The Weapon Master could gain an advantage in direct combat and, like the other two, belonged to one of the three pathways associated with the River Styx—that is, the River of Eternal Darkness—without being at a sequence high enough to be easily affected by the sefirah.
Apart from the sensible choice of potion pathways, the three-person team had also gathered a great deal of useful information during their time undercover.
The Pale Empress, Sia Eggers, had already shared some of their findings with Angel, but Pena's account was more detailed:
The funeral records kept by the Church of the Eternal Blazing Sun revealed a peculiar phenomenon: roughly eighty percent of deaths occurred within the three months beginning in mid-December. However, most were caused by attacks from nearby tribal communities. Excluding those deaths, Tizamo Town's mortality rate did not differ much from that of neighboring towns;
During that same period, many residents developed strange symptoms. Women chiefly experienced nausea, bloating, acid reflux, and