Aria stood transfixed by the otherworldly and somehow beautiful sight of Rose's body phasing into a translucent but still well-defined shape, like a perfect crystal statue. She gasped as Rose jumped, instinct telling her she was about to be struck, but the shifter passed right through her. "Woo!" Aria giggled, spinning around to face the blinking Rose. She reached out to tag her playfully, but her hand passed through as Rose phased again. The tiefling tagged several more times, and found that being able to see Rose in both states helped partially, rendering contact now about as difficult as it had been to strike material foes when blinking herself, as one was always able to see them while ethereal, albeit indistinctly.<br/><br/>She thanked the helpful spellcasters quite genuinely, making gleeful remarks about the items of magic she could now sense upon their respective persons. Then, noting the beautiful silver-haired lady's harp, she remembered Rose's idea for musical entertaining at the ship-party, and asked about hiring her to that end. The strong-limbed bardess accepted, but refused payment, alluding to the two lady adventurers' earlier donations.<br/><br/>Aria, nevertheless, made another donation on her way out of the temple in an amount the wizardess had, back at the store, hinted would be customary, although while here Aria got the sense from the handsome priest's manner that the larger, earlier donation had earned herself and Rose many such favors in any case. She tipped the wizardess for her time, above what she'd already paid of the circlet and item charges, ere the woman departed back to her shop.<br/><br/>Wandering into a circular courtyard surrounded by columned arcades and temple cloisters about that in turn, Aria glanced thoughtfully up the length of a blooming rose shrub pruned into the shape of a dancing, winged woman or female angel. It seemed quite precarious but perhaps grown or held up by some magic.<br/><br/>She frowned slightly, and spoke to Rose, "Perhaps I fell short of the extend of my familiar reflections before - in part, distraction with the errand," her eyes seemed to dance upon her own hands as they studied the arcane auras of her rings and gloves, then she looked up to Rose again, "And in part, hesitation and self-consciousness. You see, for most of my childhood I knew the story I spoke of, for I loved to hear of my great-grandfather's exploits - perhaps an inspiration to a small girl not yet an adventurer herself? - and I understood that the lady adventurer was my great-grandmother."<br/><br/>"Digging through diaries as a teenager, I realized from certain details, and even idle sketches, that this adventuring companion he loved was elven. I had not such blood, as far as I knew, nor any hints visible in either parent; no pointy ears nor almost-shaped eyes. The language of<em>her</em>diaries was Elven, too, which I was then motivated to elect the subject of in my schooling. I briefly fancied myself with a bit of elf-blood, a fun thought for, like many folk, I pictured them paragons of beauty never aging or growing corpulent - a fine hope for a girl whose blood was just beginning to burn with adolescence..."<br/><br/>"These two ancestral adventurers and the other few survivors of the frost giants' trap all banded together in a functional party. They went so far as to hunt down the source and reasons of that trap, and the ill reports which had first led them up into Icewind Dale at all. I gathered from my readings that a marilith - a she-demon - had been marshaling lesser monsters and fancied herself a rising queen of those lands. She sought wide-seeping magics to melt the place back to the humid swamplands it may've been forgotten aeons ago, and to teleport many loyal serpent-men from the jungles of darkest Chult far to the south of Faerun. She was opposed by some other but no less evil force of orcs and goblinoids more 'native' to the northern climes, goaded on by human priests who called to the Prime a devil-lord who was an ancient rival of the demoness's, as those to sorts of fiends ever seem to be."<br/><br/>"They alike were, narrowly, stamped out alike by my great-grandfather's party. After some respite, though, the band overmatched themselves hunting down the frost giants who'd first decimated the larger mercenary company. My great-grandmother wrote that, nigh to dying in the icy wilderness amongst his unconscious allies, he was approached by a woman of some strange power."<br/><br/>"She swore him to a pact, that if he would later beget upon her a child, and then take it once born to be raised, she would save them. He assented, perhaps supposing to honor the pact or nae, but later found he was...not in a position to resist. She was a fiend too, an erinyes devil, and in a position to imperil both his soul for his sworn pact, and to credibly threaten the life of his elven love and other friends. Perhaps she'd come to that part of the Prime having stolen the diabolical ideas of the two vanquished fiends, seeking to continue the work, or had simply opportunistically slipped through the brief rift left by the archdevil ere the adventurers closed it again."<br/><br/>"That erinyes devil, it seemed, was my great-grandmother by blood, not the elven heroine I would have preferred. It's not something I brood upon often, or even think of much anymore. The pirates we fought in the city were, I believe, fiend-blooded, demonic more likely, and their ill manner brought this to my thoughts again today, and my time of worries as a teenager that becoming that sort of individual might be my own fate. You shared frankly of your own past, so I thought I would in kind, though I promise it affects things materially not. I've stridden before with paladins, and each said he or she saw no evil inherent in my flesh or heart."