AgisDemon
The demon lord a summoning is addressed to. Agis is not fought and does not walk the world: he is what answers when somebody opens the ground and asks for something to come out of it, and he is gone the moment it has.
Profile
Overview
What he is for
Agis is the other end of Summon Minion. The rune opens the ground; it does not decide what climbs out of it, and nothing in these tables suggests the earth is generous on its own. Agis is who the asking goes to, and he takes his time about answering — which is what the cast is: a second and a half of a thing looming over the caster deciding whether to bother.
He appears for the length of the cast and no longer. See
actor::summoning, which puts him there and takes him away.
The ritual
What he does over a caster, in order, and how many drawn frames each act
takes. actor::summoning plays them; ritual: above is the same numbers
written down, and a test holds the two together.
| Act | Frames | Sheet |
|---|---|---|
| Arriving | 30 | the pack’s teleport in |
| Wrath | 70 | the pack’s attack3 |
| Giving | 65 | the pack’s death |
| Rising | 65 | the giving, backwards |
| Leaving | 25 | the pack’s teleport out |
The minion climbs out at the end of the giving, which is why the spell’s cast ends there rather than at the end of the sequence. Agis outlives the cast by the rising and the leaving, so a summoner may walk off while he is still seeing himself out.
The pack has no rising sheet. The giving played backwards is a thing putting itself together again, which is the whole trick and the reason an act carries a direction at all.
What he charges
tithe is what he takes out of the caster as the minion comes out of the
ground: eight health against the forty-five an
adventurer carries.
Taken off the pool directly rather than dealt as a blow, which is the point of it — armour does not turn aside a price you agreed to. Nothing flinches and no damage number flies up, because this is not something happening to the caster.
He never takes the last of it. A summoner killed by their own summoning would be a bargain nobody makes twice, so the tithe stops at leaving one. And a cast broken off costs nothing: he takes his price for answering, and an interrupted ritual was never answered.
Health does not come back on its own in Rare Icon, which is what makes it the right thing to ask for — a cost that regenerates is only a wait.
Where the pace comes from
The three acts before the minion are stretched to fill
Summon Minion’s cast_time_ms exactly — 165
frames shared out over twelve seconds, a touch under fourteen a second.
That is the only place the ritual’s speed is set: lengthen the cast and it
slows, shorten it and it hurries.
The two acts after have no cast to fill, so closing_ms is their own hold
per frame. It is kept near the gathering pace so the film does not change
gear the moment the minion arrives.
loom is how much of the art’s 320-pixel cell he is drawn at, and rides
how far above the caster’s feet he is centred — he is leaning over them,
not standing beside them.
The sprite is Fantazy 30 by Papoycore, drawn from one side only, which is why he is never turned to face anything. He does not need to face you to answer.
Why the numbers are here at all
He is not fought, so none of this is balance. It is written down because a creature with no row is a creature nobody can price later, and because the tables are the only place that says what he is rather than what he looks like. Sixty is well past anything else in these tables; the rest follows from being the thing that answers rather than the thing that is asked.
If he is ever made fightable, this row is the starting point and the fight is somebody’s whole afternoon.
Agis
The demon lord a summoning is addressed to. Agis is not fought and does not walk the world: he is what answers when somebody opens the ground and asks for something to come out of it, and he is gone the moment it has.
- Family: demon
- Personality: ancient
- Movement: scripted
- Strikes first!
- "{target} is unmade."