Back to Meetings, or on to Lost Sheep
After a moment things stabilise. You're standing on a floor, though your surroundings are too dark to see it. The eye is not so huge as it once seemed, perhaps no bigger than you. It regards you, unblinking. Now you have a faint sense of huge shape behind it. No detail, just a sense a knowledge that there is more than just they eye. Much more.
As to a sense of loneliness, no it is not lonely, though it thanks you for your concern. There are lots of passers-by here. The Eye is interested in what you have to tell it of recent events in the outside world. It seems to have very detailed knowledge of certain aspects of the old wilderness about NJ, and is interested in the ceremony that occurred in the clearing in the new forest that was elsewhere, and the other participants. You can remember a fair amount of the detail of this so tell it, but it questions you further about your last 'visit' here when you would have gone on to mention some of the later events in about that place. From the pattern of its questions on this and other matters it seems to have only a hazy knowledge of the sequence of real-world events, though the events in themselves it seems quite clear upon where it knows anything at all. While it is obviously somewhat difficult for you to tell, this isn't just restricted to events that you yourself have witnessed. It also seems only patchily interested in your companions, in the Captain and his 'problem' and Elijah and his experiences of preaching.
When you ask why you were called here, it replies that it did so because it became aware of you again and because it could, with something of a sense of surprise somewhere behind the words, that you should need to ask. When you point out, politely of course, that you don't know what happened to them, it apologetically points out that it did not know them to bring them through, and is quite willing to let you try to contact them and fetch them if they are willing. So you try for Elijah.
In the blink of an eye, you can bring a vision of him, ruffled, grubby and more than a little concerned, seemingly performing some similar ritual of his own. You're sure that his lips shape your name, but there is some barrier between you. He seems deaf and blind to you. The Eye lends aid. You hear its voice in your mind, overriding your calling:
"Come to me Elijah Richter, come to your source and bring me more"
Then there is a sense of the pause before the echo of a heavy door – such as you recall used to exist in the deep parts of the Town Guard barracks – slamming. The Eye is gone and you are falling again...
...Splash!
The mud and swamp water seem entirely physical, cold and wet. Imogen's still wiping the mess off her face when there comes a loud barking and a second splash. Drenched and blinded again she grabs at a throwing axe by instinct and reflex reaction.
“Donner! Heel! Blitzen stay! What have we here my comrades?”
Imogen reckons she could split the speaker on voice alone if she was lucky, but pauses a moment blinking and knuckling eyes with the free hand, while spitting mud so as to speak.
“Why, a fellow hunter, in distress! Please Sir, permit me –” A cloth entangles itself about her wiping hand. A few moments effort leaves Imogen with what appears to have been a fine white linen handkerchief (somewhat muddy now) in hand, staring up at an elderly gentleman with a neat white goatee and moustachios, finely clothed once perhaps, but now in a faded powder blue coat, greyed lace and with a sword and Christian-looking musket by his side. He squats on the black earth bank of the pool and extends his gauntleted hand.