Obtain the Cheese!

[Lord Grey]

Seeing as Grey and most of his top operatives are currently preoccupied on Innistrad, Hanna uses her intel on Digi to track down the cheese.

Hanna: "Based on my observations, this digital avatar is interested in the card game Magic: the Gathering, the science fiction franchise Star Trek (with a emphasized preference to the "Next Generation" series), and apparently writing his own brand of fiction that borrows elements from the first two interests. And a bit of drawing as well. So naturally, Digi of the Extranet would be..."

Hanna sets course for the Dreadnaught to intercept the star ship Enterprise. After hailing the vessel and communicating that they come in peace and wish to make a simple business transaction, Hanna and the Away Team board the Enterprise and eventually find Digi engaged in a game of Magic: the Gathering with Captain Jean-Luc Picard. In exchange for a prized cache of her employer's namesake beverage (Tea. Earl Grey. Hot. ) as well as personally autographing Digi's copy of her namesake card, Hanna successfully negotiates for custody of the cheese. With her prize in hand, she sets course for Innistrad and awaits to rendezvous with Grey and the rest of his crew. In the meantime, the cheese is currently under the watchful eye of some trigger happy security gremlins.

[magac]

*uses green pigs' space mechanical claws to grab the cheese as well as the protesting gremlins*

*stuffs cheese under blocks and blocks of wood, rocks and ice*

[Digi]

:digi looks into the holodeck viewer, watching the cheese get buried under all the simulated fragments:
"They.have no idea.", Digi thinks to himself. He pushes a few of the lit squares on a nearby touch screen console. The doorway to Holodeck 37b opens, revealing a huge landscape. As digi enters, he waves his hand on the ground, and a tunnel leading downward appears with a "waaaaaaaaaah" sound. He walks down the tunnel, which leads him directly under the rubble the cheese was buried in.
Digi waves his hand again, and the ceiling of the tunnel recedes in the exact places needed for the cheese to fall directly into digi's other, open hand, leaving the rubble around and above it completely unchanged.
With another wave of his empty hand, a simulated piece of cheese appears in the exact spot the real one was just seconds ago.
As digi walks back the way he came, the tunnel fills up behind him. Before he exits, he takes one last look.around. He walks out, smiling.
"Computer, seal off Holodeck 37b, Red Level lockdown, captain's authorization code 66714.98."
The doors close, and heavy lock is heard.
Digi then dedigitizes back to the extranet.
"Let them follow me here.", digi thinks to himself, putting the.cheese in his bag. A lightning fast beam of light passes by, and.when tail end passes, Digi and the cheese has disappeared.

[Stardust]

That lightning fast "beam of light" was actually me, being lightning fast and awesome for the moment. Digi was caught up in my wake and tumbled for several kilometers in the waves of air left behind me, but I was able to deftly snatch the cheese as I zoomed by before he even saw me coming.

I circle the Earth a couple times as I wait for my spell to rundown, then walk the streets of Paris enjoying a nice glass of wine.

[Philip Elmsbye]

Here's the long story of how I got the cheese:

Spoiler:

An English copy of Neil Gaiman's Stardust was dustily eyeing me through the window of the Parisian used book shop. That was when the words of the Weeping Oracle unexpectedly surfaced in my memory:

"At some point, right after Ephraxim or Stardust takes the cheese, it'll be Philip's!"

A palpable buzz began to spread through my body and my jet-lagged mind snapped awake. I have lived long enough in this multiverse to trust my intuition; it told me now that something was afoot. Reflexively, I turned back towards the avenue to make sure that no one was watching me. Everything seemed normal; outside of the cafe across the street, tourists continued to eat their lunches innocently under the midday sun. My eyes returned to the frayed hard-cover, examining the jacket for some clue—anything that might help guide me to my prize. I could already imagine what the cheese would smell like in my gentle hands. (Perhaps my olfactory daydreams were purely the result of hunger. I had adopted the guise of a beggar for my stay in France. As bad circumstance would have it, within weeks I had lost all my cash and had actually resorted to begging on a couple of occasions. I hadn't had a good meal in days.) But just then I recognized the significance of the cover's illustration—a comet streaking across the night sky.

A comet. I had seen what looked like a comet in the wee hours of that morning: a streak of glaring white across the sky before sunrise. It had seemed, impossibly, to fall to the earth in complete silence just blocks away. I knew, now, what it was: I must have glimpsed the luminescence of another planeswalker falling to Terra. Was it Ephraxim? Or, perfect as it would be, Stardust? Seized with the impulse to action, I took off at a sprint then towards Paris' epicenter, towards where the unearthly star looked to have fallen. And just as my pounding feet rounded the corner of the first mundane paved boulevard, I saw a figure caked in ash and holding a wheel of cheese. Surely this was the one! It had its dark back turned to me now, and I made a mad rush in its direction, cutting across furiously honking traffic and then slammed into this figure with full force. My noisome rags didn't impede me as I swiftly punched him (her?) in the stomach and grabbed my cheese-wheel. I ran, tearing off my poncho and my false beard.

Now I was out of breath and in a trash-filled alleyway. I lovingly beheld this heavy wheel of cheese , brushing away the ash that still clung to it. Finally in my grasp, it smelled exactly like I'd imagined. I closed my eyes and inhaled. Seconds later, colors were flashing behind my lids and the air about me thrummed; but I still clutched my aromatic prize tightly.
...

Suffice to say, when I came to my senses, I was on the back of a hurda in a Zendikar marketplace. I much prefer Paris. The air here is rank and I can barely catch a whiff of the wheel in my overcoat as I ride along bumpily. No one seems to have noticed my apparition. That is good, but not surprising: I am among goblins.

It is night-time now, and I am sitting with a group of wayfarers beside a camp-fire, contentedly enjoying the arcs of stars across an alien sky. These folk do not know me, and they do not even speak a common language amongst themselves. We are united only by a shared lust for adventure and, I presume, the search for worldly treasures. Little do my companions suspect that the object of my own arduous search is now mine and awaits my morning return. Little do they know of the precious foodstuff which my paternal hands have swaddled and tucked away in the depths of a barren cave, nor of the ancient sigils which protect it from the hungriest of beasts...

[Lord Grey]

While the rest of his crew and potential business partners begin negotiations to build a magical factory on Lorwyn, Lord Grey planeswalks to Zendikar in order to satisfy an old hunger.

*Grey emerges from a swirl of miasma to greet Philip's travel companions. He greets them with a tip of his hat and a warm smile.*

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Seeing as you are adventurers in search of great treasure, I have a business proposal: In my hands lies an ancient map that reveals the location of a particularly valuable cache of Ravnican zinos. Those are coins made of gold for those of you who have never traveled to the City of Guilds. And gold is valuable regardless where you hang your hat. In exchange for this information, I simply ask that you traverse one barren cave, retrieve a cache of sequestered cheese, and bring it to me. Any takers?"

After making that very convincing sales pitch, several of the adventurers brave the trials that the cave holds. Despite some unfortunate losses, they eventually emerge with the cheese and Lord Grey honors his part of the bargain by relinquishing the map. As he walks away, he takes a sumptuous bite of the mystical dairy product. His eyes flare up with golden light as a surge of power flows through his veins.

"Oh yes! That certainly hit the spot."

His hunger sated for the time being, Grey seals the cheese in a darksteel cube and deposits it in an active volcano for safekeeping. For added security, he conjures up a few Inferno Titans to watch over his magical queso.

[Lasersharp]

Hm... a volcano... OK, Aurora will cast Convincing Mirage on the volcano to turn it into a Plains, and also have some Riders of Gavony protect her from the Giants. She takes the darksteel cube, gives it a Shattering Blow, and retrieves the cheese. She hides it in one of her trap rooms as shown in the following diagram.

To get the cheese, you must make your way carefully across the uneven ground while taking care not to touch the lasers. To make things even more difficult, the wave of lasers is constantly moving left at a rate of 30 cm per second, so its never safe to stand in one place. Also, after the cheese is removed from the pedestal, the motion of the wave will reverse direction.

Please do not use any sort of wings or levitation spells or else a Nerf turret will fire 1000 Nerf darts at you (probably causing you to plummet into the lasers in the process). Touching the pink laser wave will result in covering you with pink light residue.

~Aurora, Ætherwalker