<table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td>(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/2/2d/Lu.jpg)<br/><em>Lu </em></td><td><strong>Location:</strong> Tivvum's Antiquities, Market Ward, Sigil<br/><strong>Time:</strong> Mid-morning<br/><strong>Tagged:</strong> Perrin, Alzeggra<br/><br/>"It's bad manners to pester an old woman." Though Alzeggra was in her zone of silence, the voice of old Lu was still rolling around the lifeless upper levels of the shop, perchance teasing at the ears of Peregrine below. Lu had the habit of the hard of hearing, of speaking a little louder than was really necessary. "That's because you were short this time. Should've brought me more gems, dearie." It was only Lu's voice, nobody else, and it was only Lu's slippers shuffling upstairs. "Oh? Well, you bring me that one, too, you'll get the rest."<br/><br/>The shadows where moments before Alzeggra had cloaked her form were flickering as by shaky firelight, though the lights of the upstairs were dim but steady. "It always is, it always is complicated. You're a slippery one. You'll find a way." A jeweler's lens swiveled over Lu's beady eye as she deposited a small handful of polished gemstones onto one of the counters. A plum-colored tongue bobbed through her thin lips as her frail fingers traveled across each stone, gauged some quality from them just by touch, and then inspected the prettiest and sparkliest under the light of the lantern. As she brightened the lantern, her plump shadow was chased to the far wall, becoming the silhouette of a much younger and lither creature. "Hmm, hmm, hmm," Lu went on like a pigeon.<br/><br/>There was a slow wave of reaction from the little box of gems Alzeggra had her fingers in. They were sharing impulses of fear, crudely, like when a recorder stone went misattuned and the sensations became all cloudy and indistinct. The stone wrapped in shadow cloth in Alzeggra's possession, Nilasa's stone, was one impulse among them, voiceless in the silence. It was like a collective intake of breath, but as told though recorder stones. They were only stones, after all.<br/><br/>"Her? Her who?" Lu's voice creaked with curiosity, and she looked up from her work. Her fingers closed around the lantern's handle, and as the light swung to the old tiefling's side, her shadow moved strangely, rolling along the wall like an ocean wave, becoming shorter, more rotund, more fitting to the tiefling who cast it. "She has my stone?" The tiefling shuffled without hurry to the storeroom where the drow had hidden herself. In the soundlessness of Alzeggra's spell, the horned old woman slowly cast the door open. There in the doorway was Alluvius Ruskin, with a smile too wide for her shrunken face.<br/><br/>In the shop below, the carved bone Peregrine had been contemplating wobbled and then spun in place. One of the ripped baskets on the shelves finally gave, and a cascade of old bones sloughed out into a dusty heap. The little pixie-sized mephits swarmed to clean up the mess, but scattered again with a squeak of <em>"Awk, pike it" </em>when the pile clicked and moved. From bones broken into utterly unrecognizable pieces, a clawed hand formed itself, and then an arm, which socketed into the broad shoulder assembled from parts and pieces. The bone pen knife skipped across the floor to join what was becoming a golem of bones, a four-armed enforcer of Tivvum's security.<br/><br/>The peery berks had already fled the curio shop. The clerk ducked down under the hollow of the counter, and the mephits went fluttering up the spiral stairs. "What's going on?" the clerk called up, "Lu, the golem's been activated!" But there was no answer from upstairs. There was a magical silence intervening. The golem's claws sunk into a crate of junk, and with clearly telegraphed intent, it hefted the jangling mass over its height to throw at the nagini.</td></tr></tbody></table>