Triss was busy in her little alchemy workshop. Ever since Murphy had rescued her from the city, she had kept to herself, rarely venturing out. Whenever she wasn't needed for some important event, she stayed here.
She claimed she was recovering, but in reality, she spent her days living it up, getting drunk on all sorts of fine wine the little players brought her.
Though the miserable place she lived in now had been invaded by astral shadows and then burned down, it was still considerably better than Triss's previous courtyard.
And when your house was in worse shape than a pile of rubble, the situation became a tragic sort of black comedy.
Of course, the little players had never seen Madam Triss when she'd been down on her luck and living in squalor, so they regarded the mysterious and "powerful" Madam Triss with the "reverence" due to a high-level NPC.
That model!
And on top of that, she had a special relationship with Murphy. Wasn't she probably a boss-level NPC?
Finally, Triss was a highborn mage with a very peculiar personality, making her someone the players in this "newbie village" absolutely couldn't afford to offend—and definitely didn't want to.
Lumina and her companions were summoned. They soon followed the three-eyed crow to Triss's alchemy workshop.
The resentful, noisy crow deftly landed on a dead tree in the workshop's yard. Then it tilted its head and stared at the girls, cawing incessantly. It was creepy as hell, with a distinctly intermittent, manic edge.
Perhaps the poor thing had spent nearly two hundred years without being summoned by Triss. The crow spirit must have been going stir-crazy in the astral plane.
It even wondered if the Scarlet Witch, who had once slaughtered her way through the world, had forgotten about it—until