Alias set the slipper down on the floor in front of the sofa and stared back at the other woman. Jamal was older than the "memory" that Finder had given the swordswoman, with wrinkles etched about her eyes and her neck, but she looked almost regal with her posture straighter than a schoolgirl's and her flowery housecoat draped dramatically over the sofa. She remained unbowed by the pressures of Westgate life or the sordid attacks of its underworld. Yet there remained something comic about her appearance, the frayed sleeve of the housecoat, the singed hem, the scarf half falling off, the missing slipper. Alias was reminded of meeting an artist's model once. The painting looked just like the woman, but the woman was nothing like the painting; without the brush strokes, she was less romanticized, but much more real.

"I'm nobody, also at your service," Dragonbait whispered in Saurial.

Alias shook herself from her reverie. "Oh, and this is my companion, Dragonbait," she said, indicating the saurial with a wave of her hand.

"Yes, of course," Mintassan said, nodding and offering the paladin his hand as well. "Dragonbait the Saurial Paladin. Companion to Alias of the Magic Arm. We've heard a halfling bard tell of your exploits down at the Empty Fish. Haven't we, Jamal?" the sage asked, nudging the older woman.

Alias fidgeted slightly, but kept her agitation in check. The only thing she disliked more than strangers knowing details of her life was when the strangers were spellcast-ing sages like Mintassan.

Jamal finally overcame the shock of Alias's resemblance to the sorceress Cassana and was able to concentrate on Mintassan's words. "Ruskettle," Jamal said. "МШГ8 Mouth, can that woman ramble."

"Exactly," Mintassan agreed. He turned back to Alias. "The tales, however, do not do justice to your loveliness."

Alias fidgeted again under Mintassan's appraising eyes. He had a bold gaze that she found rather forward.

Jamal sighed and slapped the mage's leg. "Mind your manners," she reprimanded.

Mintassan grinned and asked, "Please, allow me to present to you my current charge, a patient singularly lacking in patience, that talented and fearless lighter of wrongs, Jamal the Thespian, Jamal the Lady of Cheap Heroes and Cheaper Theatrics-"

"Jamal the Slightly Parboiled," Jamal finished, as she picked up her recovered slipper and slid it gingerly over her wounded foot. "So what were you doing in my burning house?" the woman asked, her distrust obviously not completely allayed by the fact that the swordswoman was a character in the halfling Ruskettle's tales.

"Um-We just happened to be passing by when we saw the Night Masks run out; of the building and toss a torch back in," Alias explained.

"And then you followed me here just to return my slipper?" Jamal asked suspiciously. "Well, no. We have business with Mintassan," Alias said defensively. "What business?" Jamal insisted.

"Grypht's business," the sage replied with a theatrical grimness. "And for such dark work we should retire to the back room." Mintassan strode off behind the shop's counter and through a doorway hung with a curtain of glass beads. "You might as well join us, Jamal," the sage called back over his shoulder. "I'll make tea. You can be mother and pour. You can serve as a witness to our transaction, too."

Jamal rose slowly and motioned for Alias and Drag-onbait to go before her. Alias suspected she did so more out of caution than courtesy. Jamal did not want them at her back.

Alias moved cautiously through the curtain, into an extraplanar graveyard. While,the trophies in the front of the shop had an air of respectability by virtue of their mounted settings, the remains of the dead in the back room gave the place a grisly appearance.

Fur and hide pelts of every color hung from the ceiling. Work tables all along one long wall were covered with boxes of bones and skeletons in various stages of being pieced together with pins and wires. Pickled internal organs filled jars on the shelves over the work tables. The ceiling was covered with strange insects stuck there with pins in their thoraxes. A box at Alias's elbow contained red eggshells and the remains of three baby birds- Snake skins and feathers lay out on the writing table beside a sketchbook. There were piles of boxes and crates beneath all the tables and all around the perimeters of the room. Alias did not want to know what was inside any of them.

"Wonderful what he's done with the place, isn't it?" Jamal said with sarcasm as she noted Alias's discomfort. "Early Abattoir-a Sembian style you don't see displayed much in the finer homes of Westgate."

"Grypht gave us to understand that your specialty was transmutation, which, if I recall, excludes the necromantic arts," Alias said, treading as politely as she could into what Mintassan's business was with so many dead things.

The sage looked back at the swordswoman with a gleam of curiosity in his eye. "My, my. Heroism, sword skill, beauty, and brains all in one. Where, I wonder, did you learn about the art?"

Alias flushed, but did not reply. Finder had filled his creation with everything he'd known, and she could forget none of it. It wasn't the first time she'd embarrassed herself with a demonstration of more knowledge than she ought to have.

"Yes," Mintassan replied to the swordswoman's comment when he realized she wasn't going to reply to his query, "you're quite right. Specializing in transmutation does exclude necromantic studies. But while other trans-muters choose to study the more mundane and commercially lucrative transmutations, straw to gold, salt water to fresh, sow's ears to silk purses, and so on, I prefer investigating the mutation of nature itself-or herself, as your religion requires."

Mintassan stood beside a massive table, which dominated the center of the room. The table, some castoff from a Westgate festhall, judging by its thick legs and velvet-covered sides, was littered with various scholarly debris: maps of the inner and outer planes, tomes with mildewing leather covers, diagrams and sketches of creatures, calipers, rulers, magnifying lenses. The sage picked up a hunk of amber larger than his fist and held it out for Alias to see.

"I am seeking the secret," Mintassan said, "of how the descendants of a creature like this-"

Alias peered into the amber and could see an animal that resembled a bat embedded within.

"-become a creature like this." With a flourish the sage yanked a black cloth cover off a second specimen- the mounted, mummified head of a tanar'ri, a powerful denizen of the Abyss.

Alias and Dragonbait drew back, startled. The next moment, though, Alias's eyes squinted in disbelief. Mintassan was teasing them, or testing them somehow. "And whose ancestor is that little fellow?" she asked, pointing to the tiny mammal skull Mintassan displayed on his vest lapel.

Mintassan stroked the tiny skull almost reverently. "My own," he declared, but a moment later he looked just a little doubtful, "I think," he amended. The sage picked up the tanar'ri head, looked around with a frown for another empty flat space, and finally set the grisly trophy in an empty crate labeled, "Spell keys and other darks." From Finder, who had traveled in other planes, Alias knew those were planar slang for magic components and mysteries.

"Please, have a seat," the sage said as he pushed all the remaining junk on the table to one side. "Excuse me while I get the tea things together." He disappeared into a side alcove, leaving Alias and Dragonbait alone with Jamal.

"Planar travel has scrambled his wits, but he's really sweet and harmless," Jamal said matter-of-factly. There were eight completely mismatched chairs set about the table. The actress flopped into an overstuffed chair of worn and tattered brocade and put her feet up on a rocker of woven cane.