The leader, a young man in woven aluminium armour, catablepas leather boots, a silver helmet and a blue spider silk cloak, lowered himself to the ground and asked the Praxian, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?"
Bullthrash looks at the man, obviously a Godlearner, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?"
The rest of the group land, they whips out magic sticks, ignites a bronze brazier, burns some strange powders and summons a lesser flying demon, which he commands into the air to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another spirit that scans the area, and begins chanting in a high pitched ululation.
The young man then opens a casket of carved ebony and brings forth many shells from a peculiar deep sea mollusc only found on the edge of Daliath's Well of Wisdom which he uses to represent the cattle.
Within seconds, the mollusc shells rearrange themselves to represent the herd beasts and a counting imp, some sort of essence demon, makes a reckoning, gibbering to himself in a forgotten language. Finally, it writes a number in dog script using the ink of a flayed walktapus, on a piece of vellum made from the stretchable hide of a nasobeme. He turns to the Praxian "You have exactly 1,586 bison and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bullthrash.
He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man surrounds it with air elementals and lifts it from the ground.
Then Bullthrash says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly who you are, will you give me back my calf?"
The young godlearner thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?"
"You're a magician from the court of Emperor Ilotos", says Bullthrash.
"Wow! That's correct," says the Godlearner, "but how did you guess that?"
"No guessing required." answered the Praxian. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used uncountable resources of power, spirits and magic trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how Praxians make a living - or about Bison, for that matter. This is a herd of Impala. ...
Now give me back my dog.
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