Phedora Bilby

Name: Phedora Bilby
Nickname: Phee
Race: Darkborn Halfling
Class: Rogue with delusions of Summoner
Place of Birth: Molthune, Inner Sea Region, Golarian (Pathfinder)
Current Home: Cellar under a burnt-out house in an abandoned village somewhere between Molthune and Nidal
Occupation: Ha! Very funny. Oh, wait. You really meant that?
Height: 3' 3'3" (measured in her favourite pair of shoes, of course. What kind of heathen measures themselves in bare feet!?)
Weight: I'm not answering that
Eye Colour: What is this? A town guard report?
Hair Colour: Currently Aqua
Current Obsession: Bangles Kittens Rainbow and Sunshine Candy
Most Recent Acquisition: Some old dude's book of magical things

Of course Phedora would have chosen the warmest midsummer day possible to actually test the summoning spell. Was it wise to have so many candles lit when the air outside was already shimmering with enough heat to convince the cicadas they should give up singing? Twenty-seven of them. The page in the old codger's book was ridiculously specific about the number of candles, though Phee couldn't possibly have explained why. She'd already flipped through the whole thing—cover to cover—and nowhere in the yellowed pages did it explain why the number of candles varied such as it did. Maybe they were a power source of some kind? Phedora had even flirted with the idea of adding a few extras in hopes that it would give the spell a boost but there was no sense in overdoing it, right? She'd already swapped out the piece of cloud fluff with a cotton ball and the cured vampire fangs with a pair of serpent ones. What was she supposed to do? This wasn't the capital of Nidal, you know. Vampires were a little hard to come by in the woodlands of western Molthune. The wand of walnut she'd salvaged from a broken old chair leg and the gold untouched by the hand of man was probably more likely to be the fool's variety than the real stuff.

It was the intention that mattered, right?

She certainly wasn't lacking in that department, even if she was having to make a few substitutions along the way. The old man in the magic shop three towns back had been sharing tales with his friends at the tavern of riches and glory won with the help of those from other planes—creatures great and small that could be summoned and bound to anyone with enough will to make it happen. That was exactly how he'd worded it. Or how she'd heard it, anyway.

He wouldn't part with his book though, even when she'd offered him a tidy sum of gold for it. Wouldn't even let her copy pages! Grumpy old fool that he was had taken one look at the ashen colour of her skin and chased her right out of his shop—just like most sane humans would. No one wanted the dark-born hanging about town. They were universally considered terribly unlucky—bad omens of the worst kind—and her halfling heritage wasn't quite enough to cancel out THAT kind of reputation.

No matter. She'd gotten what she wanted under cover of night and with the aid of her trusty lock picks which were now hidden away out of sight, lest her summoned creature take offence to her current occupation of rogue, thief and general ne'er-do-well. Starting this whole summoning thing off on the right foot was certainly more important than any pride in her current skillset.

Again she turned to refer to the page in the old tome, her finger tracing over the foreign words on the page as she triple checked the list of supplies and the lines on the diagram for the circle, which she'd carefully traced out on the cellar floor first with chalk before going over the whole thing again with salt, just as instructed. It might have been slightly lopsided. The north side was definitely a little more pointed than the others but it was too late to stop now. She'd already lit all the candles.

Damn, but it was hot in here!

A deep breath or two later and she started into the incantation, stumbling her way through the foreign language as best she could. Were these words even designed for halfling tongues? Was she supposed to roll that “r' or not? Probably that symbol there was en epiglottal stop. She was pretty sure…

Ap'za's cress le'dreaval's tap inna nau mir pooler l'k'lar Usstan lac. Ulu unsa'aa yonr lu'lubuz'wuzuf to'jol nindel vel'bolen l'Neled zek'den'vever shlu'ra belbau—

On and on the chanting went. She'd guessed already that the number three at the bottom indicated that it needed repeating and so she did. Three times. The trouble was that her understanding of the Draconic on the page was so poor that she couldn't quite grasp that she was missing important instructions; things like naming the plane to which she wanted to connect or the type of creature she wanted to summon were all lost, sending the thread of magic into wild cartwheels through all of time and space as it tried to reach some unknown destination.

It wasn't until the third time through the botched incantation that she noticed a change in the air. T'was a good thing too, as she'd just been about to give up on the whole thing as a terrible waste of time when the little hairs on the back of her neck started to rise like they did right before a lightning storm--or that one time that she got too close to a storm cleric when they were fighting some kobolds. She could feel a wind upon her shoulder where her shirt had slid to expose skin but her eyes noted that the candles didn't even so much as twitch, indicating that it certainly wasn't a REAL wind coming through the musty old cellar she'd taken up residence in. It was working!

Or... something was working.

This was happening! She was going to summon a powerful creature. A demon perhaps! Or a Demi-god. A djinni who would grant her every wish? She could almost taste the riches and power that was surely about to drop into her lap. There would, of course, be some kind of price. There always was with these sorts of things, she supposed, but what was a measly soul in return for everything her heart desired!?