On the way to the castle, Charles is accosted once more by Trevor Preston, who hands him back the custom robes he'd ordered for him the previous day. Charles declines to wear them, but nonetheless, they proceed toward the castle's hidden entrance, and descend into the arcane depths below. The guards are hesitant to the let the cocky warlock into the meeting, but some influence from Preston gets him past with his snark intact. Inside, they encounter thousands of wizards, witches, and practitioners of every color--along with an equal number of vampires, lycanthropes, Fair Folk, and a smattering of dragons and rarer creatures. The lion's share of the world's magical population--at least those of appreciable power--had all come for the party.

Charles managed to ditch Preston, only to find himself bored to tears, avoiding smalltalk, but not the drinks trolley. At some point, he realized Fiona had come along for the ride, hiding in his shadowy cloak. At long last, a gong sounded, and formal proceedings began to...announce the lengthy proceedings that would eventually lead to him going into the actual chamber, which would, at some point, eventually, lead to a long, boring chat. Sigh.

Somebody let Coyote decide where to park it while waiting for Charles, so the team ended up at a noisy disco, where he proceeded to try to chat up girls to the exclusion of all other things. Hyacinth tried valiantly to reach Charles on her radio, but couldn't hear a damn thing, so she left the building, inadvertently snubbing a couple half-drunk scots looking to have a snog. They followed her out, and Mei tailed, only after cursing Coyote to strike out with every girl he met (her Color magic made them all cry).

Outside, Hyacinth quickly resorted to violence with the brutes, and won easily; Mei simply assured no lawmen or other interlopers would get involved. The situation handled, Coyote nonetheless emerged to heroically save the damsels, picking a fight with the already-downed scots, who, after briefly making a solid showing of their own, burst into tears and ran away (due to aforementioned Color magic). Hyacinth realized her foolishness letting Coyote have his lead, and sought out somewhere quieter.

They found a shopkeep, curiously still doing business at this late hour. MacReady's, read the plague, along with "rare antiques" and "lost treasures" and "exotic wares". Sure enough, the interior was jam-packed with crystals, "haunted" dolls, and enough magicky nonsense to fill a half-dozen booths at a Renaissance Faire. Still, the buzz of true power was apparent to Mei, who set about on a quest to find something of value, ultimately sneaking past the shopkeep while Coyote distracted him. She broke into his back room, palming a nice, magicky ring.

Not to leave him entirely empty-handed, she planned to purchased a curious crystal that might well have some use for her; to that end, she absconded to find a hackable ATM, where she cheated the Royal Bank of Scotland out of a thousand quid or so. On the way back, she was spotted by a mysterious Man in Black, and cornered by a half-dozen Protocol agents, two vans, and a row of snipers.

"I died. I'm in hell," muttered Charles, well into the third hour of formalities and honorifics, shortly before the stately wizards and monsters at the center of the gathering finally got down to business.

It seems the problem in this particular Universe is that the magical world had encountered incontrivertable evidence of mundane humans using technology to reproduce supernatural effects. This development, necessarily a threat to the magical world at large, would need to be discussed by all parties, and an appropriate response determined, and put into action before it could escalate to anything dangerous. All were agreed that such a threat superceded any factional conflict between accorded parties, and reminded everyone (oh so subtlely) that any maneuvering for power during the chaos would be fruitless, as there would be no magical world over which to rule, should humans master this new technology.

As proceedings for the night were winding down, Charles interjected, blowing an air horn through the relative silence, and marching his way toward the floor. As fellow wizards and monsters looked on with horror and glee, waiting for the mother of all smackdowns, he narrated his opinion, even as the mighty senior wizards and monster lords stood in their proud indignance, allowing him to dig himself deeper with every word.

At length, he admonished the council for calling the Concordance in the first place, as it was an obvious ploy to lure all the seniormost wizards and monsters into one place, the better for a coordinated attack. He ended his diatribe standing upon the same central stage as the hoitiest-toitiest folk.

The seniormost wizard began a stinging rebuke, a soul-crushing condemnation of every facet of his character, a stone-cold admonishing of his flagrant disregard for etiquette and protocol, and a judgment that would--after several tortuous layers of process and jurisprudence--inevitably result in the harshest possible punishment for his foolishness, along with his master, anybody else who'd ever known him, and anybody else in the wizarding world named "Charles".

He got precisely one word into that before darkness overtook the entire chamber, and shouts of alarm and pain cried out amongst it.

Fiona took him by the hand, rushing away from danger, forcing him not to Look Up, and plowing her way through crowds of wizards and monsters were either fighting some invisible foe, attempting to flee, or dieing where they stood. They found a grand, brass sconce, part of the system of oil lighting that had previously lit the chamber, polished to a mirror finish. It was mirrory enough for her to leap through, although it didn't go anywhere particularly safe--outside a small radius, they were in Deep Shadow, a place even he wasn't foolish enough to visit.

And yet, even her, she seemed to know the way to the nearest vergence back into the Prime, and they high-tailed it, hoping to reach it before the inevitable wave of unstoppably powerful eldritch horrors of Deepest Shadow devoured their souls.

Outside the shop, Coyote noticed something bizarre outside. City lights were beginning to dim, and the sky had seemingly vanished. Snowflake-like flecks of pure darkness hovered in the air, floating lazily on unseen currents. And the girls were nowhere to be seen.

Sensing a moment to prove his heroism, he rushed boldly into danger, pausing only to steal an umbrella (which, incidentally, saved his life, hiding his gaze from whatever in the sky was killing everyone who looked at it). He found the encircled Mei and leapt to her rescue, easily evading the panicked gunfire of the outer guards.

The Protocol agents tried to trap them in nets, but they skillfully evaded (Mei turned hers into glitter). Hyacinth showed up, having been making plans of her own, and took out the four rooftop snipers that were pinning them down. The agents decided to cut their losses, hopping into their unmarked black van to make good their escape, but not before Hyacinth rigged it with a tracking device.

They stole the other van (not before giving it a fresh paint job (Three Coyote Moon), thanks to Mei's Color magic), and high-tailed it back to the shop to hide out the giant evil sky in the basement.

Fleeing through Shadow, the warlock and his spawn found their path back into the real world. The vergence was fully occupied by a mass of shadowy tendrils, projected by some unseen colossus, terminating in a giant eyeball that protruded into the Prime. Seemingly, this was the source of the woe afflicting the citizens of Edinburgh (as well as, presumably, the wizards below the castle). The only way out was through that. And an army of unstoppable shadow monsters was closing in from all directions.

Charles manifested a Star of the Void, which glowed brilliantly, revealing the horrific, colossal visages of the monsters all around them, and used it to hack away at the tendrils, even while pulling them away from the vergence with a hand of force. Fiona managed to give the Shadow Lords a moment's pause with her counterattack, and that moment proved just long enough to sever the eyestalk and clear the way for them to jump into the vergence before it closed.

They glid down on a shadowy cloak (Batman-style, baby), amidst the torrent of snow that the eyeball and the black snowflakes had suddenly transformed into, narrowly evading a last grasping attack by a Shadow Lord, who lost an arm to the vergence's closing edge. They landed atop the party's black van, and accompanied them back to the safehouse.

After sharing information, they surmised that at least one unknown third party--possibly more, as inside agents seemed almost inevitable--had arranged things to lead up to the Concordance, only to use the giant shadow eyeball as a means of slaying as many of them as possible. While the event itself didn't generate too much paradox, the rogue agents were still on the loose, and clearly wielded world-endangering amounts of power.

They resolved to investigate their contacts in the magical world, to see if any factions were suddenly on the rise in the new power vacuum--top suspects for their inside man. Hyacinth also set out to review the taped audio in full, to seek for any other clues amidst all the blather.

Nobody mentioned it, but following up on the tracker on the escaped van, and/or the captured van, and anything inside it, might be a good idea as well.