Slowing as she reaches the first intersection, Kori observes her surroundings more closely than her previous time walking through the maze like corridors. She makes several notes of things that she failed to notice the first time through. Like that the corridor between the Circle’s cavern and the first intersection was ever so slightly declined, just enough that the ceiling at the intersection would be just below the floor of the cavern.
Formulating an idea of the why of that, Kori makes a quick turn to her left, then again at the next intersection approximately 20 meters ahead twice more. When she arrives at the fourth intersection, she finds that instead of the path splitting into 3 options, there is no path to her left. In fact, she could safely assume that the entrance back to the Circle was directly above her head while she stood there. Going straight followed by another pair of lefts brings her back to the same spot she had started at, with the slightly inclined passage again on her left leading into the cavern.
“Ok… So, it looks like the whole thing is a grid? Each square is twenty by twenty meters…” Pausing to think the problem in front of her through, “If I assume I’m remembering correctly and that there are twelve intersections that I have to pass through, then if I choose a path and then backtrack a single intersection and take the other options from that point… I’ll find the exit eventually… If this was the correct doorway that is…”
Flipping back to her attempts to figure out the options via math in the rear of her tome, “That’s a lot of potential paths… but I don’t need to walk them all individually…” Quickly sketching out a grid with her starting place, “I have to assume the exit is the same as the entrance, either inclining or declining to reach the Clan’s hall…” looking over her little grid, taking up nearly an entire page of her tome at this point. “Probably inclining, the great cavern is too tall for me to have not noticed going up high enough for all of this.”
Looking across her grid, the lines shaky but understandable, she makes the total height and width 30 lines each in a square, she draws in a circle above the center of the grid. When she looks at the cavern’s placement a realization about the other paths of exiting the cavern dawns on her.
“I need to check that!”
Rushing back, she drops her little cup near the exit she’s chosen to make her escape through and runs to the next, and the next and finally the next. Her theory confirmed she confidently returns to gather her drinking vessel and re-enter the maze below.
“Only four of the paths lead straight from the cavern to the tunnels, the others have to take a turn just after the exit to line up with the grid!” New confidence in her first choice blooms, it’s one of the four that lead straight on to the tunnels, and she doesn’t remember a turn before they reached the curtain.
“Okay, so I’ve narrowed it down to four paths, but I still think it’ll be this one.” Going back over her little grid she begins counting out turns, “If I take a straight path twelve sections ahead and either run into a dead end or reach a thirteenth, I can turn around.” Making an ‘X’ through to the thirteenth intersection in a straight line, “Then I can turn back and try the other two exits from the last intersection,” Again, ‘X’s made at the ends of these new paths. “If those are all incorrect, I can cross off that twelfth intersection and go back one, take the other two paths and repeat…” Looking over the breadth of her little map she realizes that this is definitely not going to be quick.
“I’ll need to keep an eye out for blocked paths too, if an intersection only has two options, then the other side of that should be my exit…”
Trying to do more math and break down how to calculate the number of potential paths she has begins to lead her thoughts in circles about what happens if she reaches the same intersection from a different route on a different path with more or fewer intersections remaining on her current attempt. Her efforts rewarded with a notification popping up, and a headache, mostly the headache.
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“Well, nothing left to do but try it.”
With that Kori takes off in her straight line, intersections pass as she walks, her path taking what she feels is about five minutes until she reaches a thirteenth intersection.
“Of course, it won’t be easy and just dead end…” Looking over her map as she walks back to the last turn, she marks the line heading straight with an ‘X’ before taking the other two and finding the same, an ‘X’ at the intersection completing the set before she retreats and tries the other two paths.
“I’m gonna get lost if I keep this up…” Digging out her cup again, she places it down on the floor at the eleventh intersection, “There, I know that from here it is a straight line back to the Circle.”
On and on she goes, walking in twenty meter segments as she makes her little tick marks off on her map, stopping for a drink each time she returns to her cup at the central line. After clearing all the way back to the eighth crossing, she slumps down, grumbling about stupid mazes. On the plus side, after what had to have been at least a day of work between wandering, wondering, and a lot of mapping, she did get a few rewards for her effort.
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Through the lens of her new skill, she knows one thing for certain. Her map is terrible. It serves her purpose, but it’s still terrible.
In desperate need of a break and to put her mind to a use other than tracking left and right turns, Kori decides that a bit of reading is in order. Before that she brews herself a bit of tea to help her relax. Tea in hand, she begins flipping through the pages of her herbalism tome. Letting her thoughts be absorbed with the words and pictures for a few hours leaves her feeling refreshed. Oddly so.
“This is just weird, trying to sleep on a comfy pillow was some of the worst rest I’ve ever had.” Going through the events of the last few days events in her head. “But getting lost staring at little spirits left me refreshed like I’d slept in…” Thinking to her next rest after that, “Then falling on my face and feeling like I’d been ground in a mortar and pestle was rough, but the time spent on the floor staring out at rocks was also kind of nice…”
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Running through her time spent staring into the Emberscale brazier and how good she felt afterwards, then her time in the little cubby she found between a few benches and how that was both relaxing and refreshing unlike the pillow.
“I’m still not sure what they did to me in the Circle…” Pieces slowly falling into place. “But each time I relax my mind and just let myself be, I feel more rested than if I had slept…” The haze of magic that had enveloped her back at the beginning of the initiation sticking in her mind. “They did something to me, something powerful with how much mana was involved, but what?”
“Let’s break down what’s happened so far… I was engulphed by their spell, in a place that Ortik said was steeped in spiritual magics. After that I could see the little spirits and the glow of those bound to the totems, but I couldn’t make out the details of the shaman and I couldn’t interact with anything except my own things… Which were with me when they used their magic…” Trying to fit the disparate puzzle pieces into a semblance of a theory, she finds that there are just too many things she doesn’t know. Too many aspects of magic that she hasn’t been taught to make the leaps in logic required to tease out the why of things.
“Okay, I don’t know what they did. But it let me see spirits before I got the sense skill, so it had to affect my perception in some way. Maybe like a hallucination like the mushrooms? I haven’t passed out or become violently ill, so it wasn’t those. Plus, I didn’t eat anything they… Gave… Me…” Her eyes slowly drifting to the satchel she’d set aside. “Oh Scale…”
Taking each of her foodstuffs out of the satchel and setting them before her on their wrappings, she slowly goes through each of them. Sifting through the ground cave moss to find any irregularities, checking the fish for any additives or adulteration. Unable to find anything that stands out, even cutting open the fish to check its stomach. Turning next to the tea she sifts it into a few different dried herbs that constitute it.
“This one looks like the normal tea leaves…” Flipping her tome to where she believes the entry she needs is. “Yes, definitely white leaf camomile, that’s normal.” Pushing around pieces of the next pile of ingredients she takes a bit of time to find a matching entry. “Liverwort? That’s an odd one… I’m not sure what variety, maybe if I had some that wasn’t dried yet, but it says here that brewed it helps in relaxation and muscle stiffness… It’s also poisonous to many surface races apparently…” Taking her time trying to identify the final ingredient, a dried brown stem of some kind, proves useless unfortunately. Not that she can’t find any matches, but that the ingredient is just too generic and there are just too many possibilities to narrow down.
“None of the potential matches are threatening… I don’t think it’s the food thankfully.” Quickly putting her assumption aside and chowing down on the bland fish she’d dissected. “Giving me a bunch of nearly powdered moss is an odd choice though.” Sifting it through her claws as she ponders it. “Oh well, I’ll just have to ask when I get out of here.”
Her little break, she thinks of a few hours, ended, she decides to continue her little exercise of mapping. After many more hours of crossing off paths, she finds that more and more of the options can be eliminated as they would cross and end in territory she’d already covered. Each major intersection on the straight path making the next just a little easier.
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“I really hate this part… Wish we could see what she was doing.” Ortik mumbles to himself, “She’s been in the maze for nearly two days.”
“Whatever spirit’s guiding her must not be all too kind then. Looks like your little ‘apprentice’ isn’t going to make her deadline. Only a bit over a day left!” Lowy’s cackles return, her demeanor pleased at the prospect of Kori’s failing and needling Ortik with it for years to come.
“There’s still plenty of time…”
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“What was that about time you were saying, Spiritcaller?” Lowy staring at the corpse still figure in the middle of the circle. “It runs out soon, just a few hours left.”
“Oh, scale off Lowy.”
With a withering look of indignation towards him, “Don’t get snippy with me, I told you she wasn’t right for the Circle.”
Their bickering continues back and forth as the little figure laying in the middle of the room begins to stir, their attention on each other and not noticing their young charge waking from the state she had been reduced to.
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After what felt like days, she was fairly sure it was days, her food was running low after all, Kori finally finds what she’s looking for. Or at least a sure sign of it. An intersection with only two paths to choose from. It lay well off the left hand path from the starting point, she had completed the entire central path and most of the one to the left before she located it. Quickly tracing the path around the square and finding what she’s been searching for, a slight incline raising above the meter and a half height of the tunnel over the course of its segment.
Taking stock of the last several days, she thinks it was three, but this might be the fourth, she’s not really sure. She recalls the gains she’s made in her intensive lesson in navigation and map making.
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Navigation had certainly gotten the better of the practice, her map was still pretty bad after all. But the one she was proud of, and the one that had given her the most difficulty considering what she was attempting to calculate, was her maths. Who knew beating your head at attempting to calculate how to escape a maze was so good for growth… It was also quite good at creating mind numbing headaches.
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In addition to her skills raising, she was also pleasantly surprised by a number of other notifications.
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Overall, an excellent week’s work, or near enough to.
Her pace quickens as she ascends the slight incline, the path continuing uninterrupted beyond for a few dozen meters. Unlike all those that came before it, this path winds and twists and continues to rise on an ever so slight incline, until she reaches a door. A door she remembers from her first entry into this place. A door now glowing with inner light.
“Huh… I guess it makes sense to bind a spirit as the last line of defense…” Moving her hand outwards she tries to push the door. Realizing that it, like everything else since she started this laborious trial, remains immovable to her hands.
Before she can even begin to formulate a plan for this door, she sees it flare in the same bright light of the earlier totems. When they ate the little spirits. Scurrying back from the light she trips, landing firmly on her tail as she looks up at the looming door, seemingly grown in size to tower over her. Her sense of the spirit feeling a hunger and anger towards Kori. The first spirit that has seemed to even notice her existence.
The total dark of the lightless tunnels suddenly flares with light and her vision is blinded. She’d been relying on her [Darkvision] for days on end, so the natural light of her new surroundings left her eyes watering and blurred as she holds them tightly shut.
She hears other Kobolds nearby, the sounds booming in her ears after days of near total silence save for the garbled echoing sound of her own voice. Rolling to her side and peaking through barest slits of opened eyes, she can just barely make out figures nearby. Less distinct now than they were when the trial first began.
“Uhgh… Too bright…”
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A sound interrupting their argument, drawing both of their attention, they look towards the floor of the dais just a few meters beyond where the pair sits.
“See, I told you she’d make it.” Ortik exclaims, a smug look turned back towards Lowy.
“Did she now? I wouldn’t be too sure Ortik. It’s true the seven days aren’t up, but we’ll need to check her dispelling rune to be sure she didn’t quit.” Her scowl turning from indignation at Ortik to just plain disdain when she sees the youngling stirring.