GRANDMOTHER

An hour later and miles away, Grandmother came to a stop in a rest. She sat down against a wall where she had a view down the corridor they were traveling. Todd pulled up to a stop, breathing hard. He sank against the opposite wall, with a view the other direction down the corridor. Grandmother pulled up her map and started making notes.

“How do you hold conceal so long?” Todd asked, when he caught his breath.

“The drain isn’t that bad against animals getting quick glimpses. It is easier the faster we move. It is much harder in a square full of thinking minds,” Grandmother replied. “Did you see anything interesting?”

“I saw several glass fronted arcades. Is that what you're looking for?” Todd asked.

“I am looking for inscriptions, rests, galleries, squares, grand staircases and normal stairs. The arcades are also interesting because they give us a feel for the type of contents in these rooms. Try to mark on your map where you saw them. If you see any unique hall arrangements mark them too, especially if they repeat. We really haven’t spent much time in this type of area. I want to know what kind of topography we have around here, as a first step in exploiting it for development or defense,” Grandmother responded.

Todd opened his map and started making notes. Grandmother finished with her map and took a long drink from her water flask.

“Have you found any squares?” Todd asked, still looking at his map.

“Two,” Grandmother responded. “Both are above Home Square, one is roughly west and has no crystal. The other is to the south east. It is odd, but it has a crystal. It’s small but larger than Londontown’s crystal when we left.”

“How is it odd?” Todd asked.

“It is nowhere near a green,” Grandmother explained. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.”

“Not on a green?” Todd said in a puzzled voice.

“Yeah, just a back door and it seemed smaller. I wanted to touch the crystal so I could fast travel to it and check it out closer, but I decided I had enough responsibility. Do you want to touch it?” She asked in an innocent voice.

“No, I think I will pass,” Todd responded. He closed his map and drank from his own water flask. “I wonder how many other squares we have missed. When our group came south we scouted greens looking for a potential square. We cut through the hall space as fast as we could.”

“Most people do,” Grandmother responded. She rose to her feet. “Ready?”

Todd took one last drink of water before rising to his feed. “Ready.”

Grandmother’s next stop was a dead end. With her back to the wall she canceled the conceal and replaced it with the much lower tier camouflage. Grandmother suspected that rests were rarer here than in the tier two space above from their trips through tier three space on their exploration trips south. There was a chance that in their headlong trips south they simply missed most of the rests. This exhaustive search showed that wasn’t true. They really were rarer.

She opened her map and marked down everything of interest that she remembered. When she finished, Todd opened his own map and did the same. “Did you see that wide spot with the large doors?” Grandmother asked him.

“Yes,” Todd said. “We passed something like it on our way south two or three trips ago.

“I thought it looked familiar,” Grandmother replied. “If we find another one, let’s do a sweep of the room.”

“Alright,” Todd agreed. He finished with his map. Grandmother handed him a travel bar from her small pack. He started eating it without comment, washing it down with water.

Grandmother wondered if Todd realized just how impossible what they were doing was. He was so focused at keeping up that she doubted he thought farther than that. They just ran for hours at near what was the recorded limit of a human’s speed. It should have been impossible to hold that speed for more than a few seconds.

Grandmother wanted to check the room beyond the doors because a large section of her map in that area remained stubbornly dark. That indicated no hallways ran across the area. There were matching blank sections on the floors above, although they did grow smaller higher up. The area was not as large as a green, but it was larger than the courtyard in a square. It reminded Grandmother of the industrial spaces in the south. Most of those spaces didn't have hallways. Instead doors in industrial rooms gave access directly to another room. The area around the Gallery did have halls. The rooms there seemed to be in line with the office space sections found in most of the human territory. Grandmother thought of it as the executive offices for the factories.

Although Grandmother didn’t complete a detailed search of the rooms in this section before, the group did loot a few here and there on exploration missions. She thought of the area as commercial mixed with light industry. The room where Alex and Grandmother found the workbench was an example of the light industry type. It was in the easier section of rooms above, but Grandmother thought it was a ‘spillover’ from the room types below.

The arcades Todd spotted earlier were an example of the commercial type. They very seldom contained anything useful in them. They appeared to be simulations of storefronts. Very rarely they contained vendors that sold odd very specialized items. They saw only single story versions today. In earlier expeditions Grandmother saw ones that were two and even three stories tall, with the upper halls turned into balconies.

It took Grandmother a longer time to recover while holding the camouflage spell. Normally the physical drain of the tier three spell was unnoticeable to her anymore. Todd was looking fully recovered when Grandmother decided she could go on.

Near the end of the next run, they found another set of large doors. Grandmother slowed to a stop. She stood close to the wall of the larger section, where she could see down the length of the departing corridor while hiding the bulk of her body around the corner. She still held the conceal spell active. These corridors were heavily occupied. In their run they’d passed badgers, hall spiders, cats and cougars. The wide spot before the doors was empty, but a pride of cougars were passing across the hall ahead of them. Grandmother stood still waiting for them to move on. Todd joined her, turning his body to look down the approaching corridor. The widened area was too large for him to mirror Grandmother's stance on the other side. If he went that far the conceal spell would have made Grandmother vanish from his sight.

This door was close to the first one they saw. They navigated a large number of dead ends before Grandmother determined that access north was blocked to the east of the blank spot on the map. She circled south and started running corridors east-west working back north. A quick glance at the map left Grandmother convinced that these doors were opening into the same blank space on the map.

The cougars finally cleared the cross corridor. Grandmother dropped the conceal and cast camouflage and muffle in order to lower the drain on her while they faced the unknown danger in the room.

“The door opens out,” Todd observed. “Should I take a look?” Grandmother dropped her surveillance of the hallway in order to inspect the door behind her. Todd's position looking back the way they came, gave him a better view of it. It did open out. There were large half circle handles mounted on each of the two panels of the door. The handles were unique.

“Go ahead,” Grandmother replied. Todd shifted his position to just outside the doors. Grandmother followed behind him, keeping close. Todd used his off hand to pull the door farthest from them just slightly open. He put his eye close to the open crack and peered inside. He eased the door back closed, before reporting to Grandmother.

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“It is dark inside. I can only see a sliver of the stone floor.” Grandmother thought about that for a moment. Close to the edge of the structure was dark space, where the overhead light panels were defaulted off. The farther you traveled in the more light panels were defaulted on. Around Home Square nearly every light panel was powered. The few that weren’t tended to “wake up” if you got near. An entire room being dark was a warning of some kind.

“Let me try,” Grandmother said. They switched places. She barely opened the door and placed her eye tight against the crack. Just as Todd reported the room on the other side was dark. An arrow of light from the cracked door raced away from her. She cast night vision. The arrow of light became a spear, shooting off into a massive black space beyond. Her eyes were adjusted to the bright light leaking in from the hall so that far distance was still dark even with the night vision. She could see a landing straight ahead. The walls on either side stepped down to the floor. Over the top of them was more darkness, with just the hint of a ceiling far above.

Grandmother dismissed night vision and pushed the door shut. She took a moment to check all directions for any sign of approach. “I can’t see much, just a concrete landing. It looks empty. I don’t like the darkness.”

“I don’t either,” Todd responded. “The light spills in from the hall. Let’s open and wedge both doors. If nothing comes out we can think about our next move.”

“Agreed,” Grandmother replied. “Do you have a wedge?”

Todd pulled one from a pocket. He may be traveling light, but not that light. Grandmother retrieved her own wedge. She took the right door while Todd took the left. At her nod, they both swung their door open and wedged it in a well-practiced move. They both stood alert and ready for action. Nothing emerged.

Grandmother leaned inside. She couldn’t see much more than before. She leaned in and threw half a dozen light spells at the distant ceiling. The balls of light disappeared into the darkness without hitting any light panels. Grandmother decided that if she wanted to know what this room was she needed to go inside.

She gave a nod to Todd and stepped forward onto the visible platform. As she stepped through the doorway narrow arcs of light came on starting on the outer wall and running to the center of the room. A large section of the center of the ceiling was covered in light panels. There were no light panels directly above the door, that explained the failure of her light spell. She found herself standing on the side of a big bowl. Wide stair steps sank down in front of her. She turned and checked behind her. The same wide steps marched up behind her, to an outer round wall. The doorway looked like a tunnel leading out from this side. This explained the stepped down look of the side walls. They were a side view of the descending platforms. A single level appeared to ring the entire area. Studying it, Grandmother decided it was more an oval than a circle. She judged the outer wall oval to be about 400 by 300 feet.

There was another set of doors about a quarter of the way around, still at this end. Grandmother realized these were the doors they passed earlier. Across the center she could see more doors, mirroring these two sets, only they were at least a story lower down, maybe two. There were two more doors, across the short dimension of the oval. They were even lower down.

“It's a theater,” she commented. “Or maybe an amphitheater is a better description, even though it’s not open air.” Todd came forward and hunkered down at the edge of the flat walkway at the entrance. After a quick glance around he leaned forward to study the center.

“I think coliseum is the right word,” Todd replied.

“Colo.. what?” Grandmother asked him.

“Ha!” he said in triumph, “Coliseum, like in ancient Rome where they held fights between gladiators. You need to study more Earth history.”

“Why do you think that?” Grandmother asked.

“Him,” Todd replied, pointing down into the center. The center stage was actually a pit, dropping down another story from the last circle of steps. The solid section of light in the center illuminated the floor below. In the center of the pit was a skeleton.

Grandmother hunkered down next to Todd to study the dead man. She cast eagle eye on herself. The longer she looked at the same object, the larger it became. The spell wasn’t that useful in the halls, where line of sight was limited. She usually used it in greenspaces. It was dangerous to use for too long, since as the object you looked at grew larger, your peripheral vision vanished. This gave animals the opportunity to sneak up without being seen.

The first thing she noticed was the skeleton was not human. It was something close; it possessed one head, two arms and two legs. But one splayed hand clearly showed six fingers. The skull was wrong too

“What do you think?” Todd asked.

“It is staged,” Grandmother observed. Bodies did not linger in the structure. Nanobots took them apart in a matter of days if an animal didn’t discover and consume it first. “I think it is a warning that you can die here. Is it wearing armor?”

“I believe it is,” Todd responded. “It’s transparent and hard to see.”

“Glass,” Grandmother responded. “I guess we know where Londontown’s blacksmith’s brother’s spouse's aunt got her glass gloves.”

“Wasn’t it his aunt's brother’s spouse?” Todd queried.

“Whatever,” Grandmother replied, doubting that was right either. “So the skeleton is a warning about the penalty of failure and the promise of reward on success. It doesn’t seem like a single item is worth it, even made out of glass.”

Grandmother considered the drama used to reveal the pit. It was an enticement to get players to rush down there and jump into the pit below. Studying the pit, she saw no way out. The walls below the lip looked solid. Even with Companion’s climbing spell, it would take time to get out, during which a climber would be vulnerable to attack.

“Ellen told me once that all the crafts have a pattern map. Crafters can only make the items revealed on their map. I don’t really understand that, I swear I have seen Ellen create items much more free form than that. She told me if she repaired an item she received an increased chance of that pattern becoming visible,” Todd offered. “Perhaps getting that armor would allow our crafters to gain the pattern. That might be worth the risk.”

“Did she mention any other way to get a pattern?” Grandmother asked.

“Yes, let me think. She said learning the skills to construct an item could reveal it if it was next to something you already knew. Knowing a pattern is different from seeing a pattern. She said seeing an item could reveal it if you had the skills to make it and it was close to one you know. Close in this case must not be adjacent, since the first rule would reveal that.” Todd reported. “It was complicated.”

“I bet your chances increase even more, even if it is farther away, if you see someone else craft it,” Grandmother said. “That would explain why the children of crafters tend to become crafters. They are all unofficial apprentices of their parents.”

“Yeah,” Todd replied. “That makes sense.”

“I am starting to think on the next tour we need to figure out a way to buy patterns,” Grandmother commented. Grandmother looked back to the skeleton. “Not today,” she said suddenly. “I have a feeling if we drop into that pit, getting back out will not be easy. We need to think about this and plan carefully. It might be a topic of discussion with the selkie.”

Todd agreed. They backed out of the room, retrieved the wedges and let the doors close. Grandmother recast conceal on them. At Todd’s indication that he was ready, they continued the survey.

They returned early enough to buy an evening meal from the innkeeper. It was late enough that the dining room was almost empty. Grandmother went over with Todd everything they’d noticed during the day's run over the meal.

“I am going to meet with Harry tomorrow to go over my findings. I am leaning toward pushing any warrior or hunter types in the direction of the prospective square, while steering the poorly equipped to the odd square. What do you think?” Irene asked Todd.

“That sounds acceptable to me,” Todd responded. “I think we need to find someone we trust to claim the crystal in the odd square.”

“How about Harry?” Grandmother asked.

“He is very loyal to Home Square. You could order him, but I don’t think he will volunteer. We would be better off with one of his children,” Todd replied.

“How many children does he have?” Grandmother asked, before remembering she once thought Todd might be Harry’s son. The two men shared a similar look. They were both had broad shoulders with narrow hips and a heavy muscular build. She never did get around to confirming or refuting that idea.

“Five,” Todd replied easily, which made Grandmother think Todd wasn’t one of those children.

“Do you want to pick one?” Grandmother asked him.

“Let Harry pick,” Todd replied. “But do it in a way that he can tell his other children that you picked. That should keep the peace in the family.”

“I can do that,” Grandmother replied. She pushed her empty plate aside. She picked up her cup and took a drink. “Maybe I should ask Joe to do it,” she commented.

“The bowmaker?” Todd asked.

“Yes, he is the highest ranking crafter in the square. Perhaps a square without a green will end up a crafting square.”

“It might,” Todd agreed, “but Joe is a bowmaker. That is a woodworker. Of all the crafts I think that might be the one most tied to a greenspace.” Grandmother was still thinking about it. “Can you bring both Harry and Joe around for breakfast?” she asked Todd.

“Will do,” Todd responded.

“I am off to bed,” Grandmother said, rising to her feet. “I will see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight,” Todd said in farewell.

Grandmother climbed the stairs to her room.