Chapter 38: Chapter 38 – Plan

We don’t spend very much time talking about the curse, mostly because when I flat-out tell them we’re not talking about it because neither of them can do anything about it, they settle down and stop flailing around. Sure, it’s progressing, and sure, it kinda sucks that I can’t see my health or mana anymore, but my skills all work just fine and I can tell if I have enough mana to pop out a Mote, so there’s no problem that’s important enough to delay ripping this scenario apart.

“If my lord will deign to give us our path,” Amber says, “his Paladin stands ready to serve.”

I wince. Look, I’m not exactly the most socially deft or whatever, but I’m not a complete idiot. I still suppress the urge to apologize. The clock is ticking, and I don’t have the right words to make things right. All I have is, well, the path; I nod towards the big door and set my shoulders. “There.”

Zidanya scowls. She’d been scowling at Amber for a bit, and now she’s pointing that expression at me, and it’s making me nervous and anxious. “Go we up, we rejoin the city, having let the response pass us by; we shall long from here be gone ere the shift change reveals the deaths. Go we down, we… what, Magelord?”

“Titles from both of you; I feel like I should expect the engines to go quiet, but, well.” I shake my head, unable to restrain a smile. Humor as a way to deflect, both others and myself, has been one of my go-tos for decades. “Looking at the layout, I noticed something interesting.” There’s a pencil and plenty of paper around; sure, most of it is ledgers, but whatever, they’re never going to use them for anything again, so I start sketching. “The cells are in an interesting pattern, aren’t they? Normally you would expect something square, or at least regular and rectangular, and you’d expect something more defensible.” My pencil scratches against the paper.

“This is the corridor.” Zidanya opens her mouth, and I smirk, shaking my head. “I’m not just guessing. The patrol times and durations are in the ledgers, and which prisoner blocks they check on in which order, and how long it takes them to go from one to the next. That, plus the naming convention, plus the markings for when one patrol meets the other going the other way, plus this?” I wave my hand at the textured, speckled wall, gleaming with glints of green and blue. “This is a map, but it’s not to scale. It’s just cell blocks, relative position, like a transit map. All of this together is over-provisioned for the puzzle that this represents.”

I wait for a moment. “Magelord,” Zidanya finally says, with a less scowling look on her face. “You should have led with the wall.”

I pause, blinking. I look over at Amber and see her nodding, and nod at the two of them in turn, slowly. “Okay. Um. So, this is basically a rectangle, except a third of the way down the east side, it does a little turn-y thing and then connects to this room, to the door I’m gonna call the north door now.” I wasn’t particularly committed to the compass directions when I called the big banded door face of the room the east, so I’m happy enough to pick up the directions implied by the map. “On the west side of the rectangle there’s what the notes call ‘the western gap’. Just to the north and south of the western gap there’s the ‘western gallery, north’ and the ‘western gallery, south’, and I think those are more shooting gallery and less art gallery.”

“As I’ve no notion of what an art gallery is, my lord, you may have the right of it.”

I grin at Amber; if she’s engaging with the description and the plan, I can’t help but think that we’re going to be okay. “There’s another similar set of gap-and-galleries on the vertical corridor that’s about a quarter of the way east of the western edge of the complex. Then to the north of that, still in that corridor, you’ve got the roundhouse, secondary guard complex; there’s ten guards there, including two elites who are about equivalent to Samson here.” I nod to the corpse of the shields-wielding fellow. “Then there’s the dogleg bits, where the corridor zigzags on its way north in order to give a restricted space and open up for a fighting retreat, theoretically.

“All the while through this, there’s cells along the corridors, stacked two vertically - that’s why the ceilings are so tall. They’re in patterns themselves…” I smile with a genuine glee as Zidanya gets it.

“Tis a rune,” Zidanya breathes. “Draw, pass, and… focus, an I understand ye correctly?”

“Draw, pass, and store, I’d say, but store and focus are maybe compatible or equivalent verbs, for these glyphs?” I look at Amber. “Um. Right, unpack. The draw rune would be drawing from the cells if the cells weren’t full of automata that are generated by the scenario in the first place, which would be pointless cannibalism. That’s why it’s stacked two high; the height lets them turn that into siphoning from somewhere below us.”

“Where we’d find the interface from the Temple into this realm,” Amber says slowly, nodding.

I push down the urge to kiss her, with some difficulty, and just grin at her. “Yeah. Which is a potential keystone to unraveling the place.”

Zidanya picks up one of the pencils and sketches another line with a much lighter touch than my own, extending from between the dogleg and the roundhouse towards the east, and then heading south again with a dogleg parallel to the eastern gap-and-gallery markings. “If the glyph holds true,” she says in explanation, “yet the map shows it not.”

“Patrol schedules do, and there isn’t necessarily anything against there being something there.” I frown. “It’s not in the prisoner ledgers, though. Which is… interesting.”

“Interesting to visit,” Amber says thoughtfully, “or interesting to avoid?”

I frown. “I don’t know the glyph it’s drawing. I mean, I know the two-dimensional one, but not the three dimensional one. Is the shifted focus under that eastmost of the three north-south cell corridors?”

“May be at that,” Zidanya says. She draws a circle just north of the dogleg on that corridor, and then marks it with a dash, and marks the roundhouse with the same. “The nature of an ellipse,” she says, and I nod.

“Those are the focuses?” I blink. “What a deeply weird ellipse, in context.” They both snort in clear amusement. “What? Look at them! By what star’s light do you find a set of points equidistant to those two that defines any sort of shape relevant to anything in the rest of this puzzle?”

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“This,” and it’s Zidanya saying it as Amber practically chokes on a laugh, “is why I’ve a passing fondness of you, Magelord.”

“Because I don’t like it when a puzzle breaks the appropriate forms?”

“As you say; and for being one who objects to the geometry of the puzzle, for it being displeasing to the purity of what it may be.”

“Whatever.” I mock-scowl, but my eyes drift towards the wall indicating the cell blocks. My good mood evaporates in a moment, and I notice my shoulders drifting upwards into a defensive hunch. “I shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of craft. This entire scenario was generated with objectionable character.”

“What then for the plan, Adam?”

I look at Amber, thinking. “I think the narrative plan was for this to be either an extraction or a prison break. That means there’s a valid, traversable path, and opposition that we can handle, up until we go off the track.”

“Which will be when we move into that corridor not shown on the map?”

I blink. “I hadn’t even thought of that. I mean, I hadn’t thought of what it might be other than that, either. That’s a good notion.”

“North or south? Hie we the former, we run the doglegs, and the gallery if the latter.”

“We pass through these chambers if we take the north side.” Amber frowns. “What are they?”

“Storage, sort of.” I frown. “Um. Sort of a way of having the glyph store magical energy in an… aura?”

“The glyph might fire an we attempt to traverse it.” Zidanya looks grim. “With enough power... we should be better induced to go elsewhere.”

“South, then. We’ll go as fast and stealthy as we can, without actually burning any resources, and hit the roundhouse after passing the gallery, which we’ll just have to figure out how to traverse. Kill everything there, so they don’t bother us once we leave the track, and then probably Amber Sunders us down into where the mana’s being collected?”

“We might alternatively,” Zidanya says carefully, “swing west. Take the gallery which stands farther from the guards, wend north around the corridors, and take the dogleg south to the roundhouse.”

I think about it. “We’re trading off being active for longer in exchange for doing the gallery-pass farther away from the guards, right? And maybe coming at them from an angle they don’t suspect, but they’ll probably know we’re hitting them once we hit the doglegs.” Zidanya nods. “I don’t have an opinion, I guess. You think we should do the longer swing? What about you, Amber?”

“Shorter,” the Paladin says firmly. “I’ve seen you trying to move silently or stealthily, my lord. Less time trying to do so seems wise.”

“Oof.” I wince theatrically, only moderately exaggerated, as Zidanya snickers. Amber doesn’t laugh, though; she just looks at me levelly, and I meet her eyes and nod. “You’re right.

“Okay. We know what we’re doing. I’m going to bring as much Dispel and Disenchant power to bear as I can, but it’s not going to be as much as planned; I’m regenerating mana a fair bit slower than I was on the surface, down here. Other than that, any changes, any questions?”

They both shake their heads and a ripple of readiness goes through me, goes through all three of us, probably.

I look at the door, that two-and-a-half-meter, iron-banded door with its three deadbolts and hinges looking fit to outlast a missile strike. I breathe in, half out. Ready. “Then let’s do this.”

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