Within a week Frex has formally established his mission to the citizens of Ovvels. Maybe they’re flattered at his attention, maybe they’re just polite. In either case, he’s clever enough to see what they are hungry for and to give it to them. He styles himself an ambassador of change.
He details the challenges out loud to them. Surely these canny Quadlings can see that the world is unsettling itself? The people of Ovvels can’t deny the risk to their way of life.
The old ways threatened, the revered ancestors panicked into silence.
First, the miracle of corundum in calcite: the Ruby Peril! Too many plantations of vegetable pearls are being despoiled by the mining of corundum deposits buried in the earth beneath the flood.
Next, the grip of the Emerald City upon the province is tightening. There’s that damned highway. It’s a yellow brick noose, constructed to strangle the good old ways, Frex claims. The overlords from away finance their incursion into Quadling Country by flooding their home markets with rubies extracted at the expense of the old Quadling way of life.
No, he isn’t one of the military men from the Wizard’s government; he’s in opposition somehow, as the Quadlings are. He’s here to teach them a new approach to coping with the forces oppressing them from beyond their marshes. His own deity hides behind the screen of an impossible name—the Unnamed God—while the local spirits of the Quadlings, if they’re even addressed as spirits, seem evanescent. Sadly ineffectual. The forebears gone before us have all absconded into the mist. The Surges and Surprises, as they’re called, those ancestral overseers; shape-shifters by name and definition. As unreliable dead as they were living. Where are they now when we need them?
In short, Ovvels is a community ripe for conversion. The need to believe in something more steadfast has become pressing.
Brother Frexispar is not like the Quadlings. That’s part of the attraction, Lei murmurs, once her kinspeople have overcome their native courtesy and reserve and actually taken a look at him. He’s tall and pale in contrast to their ruddy, more leathery miens. While they wear woven hats with shallow peaks and broad brims, Frex goes bareheaded, or he sports a blocky toque ornamented with a tassel, something like a bell pull. And there’s the beard, which seems a prophetic accoutrement to the mostly beardless Quadlings. It’s grown long and pillowy compared to the manicured moustaches of Emerald City civil engineers. That it’s also somewhat rank perhaps adds to its effectiveness, though in saying so Lei provokes in her tenant a formidable frown. He stalks off to a lather and pomade.
Frex’s command of Qua’ati has improved over the years since he left Munchkinland with his wife and oldest child. He’s also learned how better to engage his clientele. His rhetoric is by turns cajoling and lyrical, and certainly less accusatory than it once was. Despite their worries, the Quadlings of Ovvels are a complacent lot. They respond to approval more surely than they do to condemnation.
And of course, Elphie. She’ll never really take the measure of how significant she is to her father’s success, but no doubt about it—she’s his instrument. Her voice is his. When she manages one morning to sing a hymn in carefully translated Qua’ati, the congregation sulks. The attendees prefer Elphie’s to be a voice of mystical connection to the unknown, so when she uses their own familiar language, the magic is cheapened. She reverts to standard Ozish in short order—at Frex’s curt command.