The railroad switches turned out to be a dead end. When a railcar rolled through a switch it would randomly change or not. The mine was a huge maze that changed every time they entered it. They would see a new rail line be laid by a snake that would be a completely dug out tunnel on the next visit, or reset to solid stone.

Grandmother wished she took the time to run to the Speedwell and review their footage from the first trip. She suspected the walls would be the solid gray of a nanobot matrix in the footage. The sparseness of the tunnels through the surrounding ‘rock’ made Grandmother suspect that all that space was being used for something else, like power production or breeding animals to be released in the structure above.

They were pressed against a side wall of a tunnel waiting for a dumper to pass. The dumpers ran in total darkness. They sounded almost exactly like a digger on approach, but if there was no light, it was a dumper. The payoff for taking out a dumper wasn’t really worth it. Grandmother was still trying to maximize their earnings on this run, even after she found the coins sitting in Home Square’s account. She was worried she should be spending Home Square’s money on something she didn’t know about. She was working on how to bring the subject up with Ray-Do-So, Seagrass’s crystal owner, without offending the selkie.

Grandmother tilted her head. The sound from the dumper was changing notes. That would indicate that it was changing speed. That was new. As it trundled past them, it was definitely slowing. Grandmother jumped out behind it.

“Follow it close,” she called out to the team. “Hopefully its passage deactivates the traps.” Grandmother jumped onto the rail and ran. Everyone else fell in behind her. She held herself to Sarah’s top speed, not wanting to lose her group. At first the dumper pulled ahead, but it was slowing. Very quickly Grandmother was closing the gap. She dropped her speed to match the dumper, keeping the machine just on the edge of her enhanced vision.

It came to a stop. She stopped herself. Squatting down in place on the rail. She signaled Ellen to check for traps to the right. A rumbling sound was coming from the dumper. Ellen declared the right clear. Grandmother stepped off the rail and moved close to the tunnel wall. Grandmother signaled for them to advance. She dropped back even to Alex.

“I want to know what it is doing, get as close as you think you can without drawing its attention. If it moves away, hide and let it go. Mark where it is and we’ll check the area after it moves,” Alex nodded his understanding. He moved forward. Grandmother waited until Ellen and Companion passed her, before retaking her standard position.

They were still closing the distance when the rumbling sound stopped. There were a couple thumps and the dumper began moving again. It rolled forward, away from them. They hugged the wall until it was out of sight.

“It stopped right here,” Alex reported. Everyone started looking around, trying to decide why.

“There is a spell ribbon on this rail,” Sarah reported.

“This one too,” Ellen reported looking at the other rail.

“What spell is it?” Grandmother asked the sisters.

“I don’t recognize it,” Sarah responded. That was saying something. Sarah was pulling her notebook out and making notes, so was Ellen. Grandmother went over to look at the ribbons. Ellen’s rail was written the opposite direction from Sarah’s. They were two different spells, or Grandmother thought, two hands of the same spell. The timing on the first symbol in both ribbons indicated Ellen’s was the main hand. The first symbol was a two, making this a tier five force spell. Tier five spells were incredibly hard to find. Grandmother only knew a handful of them.

“It’s a tier five force spell,” Grandmother observed.

“Is it ring of death?” Todd asked.

“No,” Grandmother said. “I’ve never seen it before.” The real problem with tier five spells was that most were extremely dangerous and they took a long long time to learn. It took her three months to learn ring of death. She traveled far from anyone else, because she couldn’t predict when it would first work and she didn’t want to accidentally kill anyone with it.

Spell ribbons did not include the start and finish move. This spell could be thrown, imbued or tapped. It could be directional, contained in the object tapped on or like the ring, expand to kill everyone in the room. There was also no description of what it would do.

“Do you see that line of dust there?” Companion asked. He was standing back from the rails, pointing to a section of the rail inside the ribbon. Sarah was the closest. She reached out and ran her finger through the dust. She rubbed two fingers together.

“It’s rock dust,” she reported, “and I mean rock. It isn’t clay. It is far too gritty.”

“There is another line here,” Grandmother said, from where she walked down the track. “I think the dumper pulled up here, a trap door opened, and it dumped its load. That was the rumble sound we heard.” They named the machines dumpers because they were carrying loads like a dump truck. It looked like they were more aptly named than they realized at the time.

“A trap door?” Companion asked. “It will open if we step on it, dropping us to our death?”

“I don’t think it is that simple, but let’s check,” Grandmother said. She pulled a rope out of her pack and tied a large loop in it. She slipped her staff through her belt at the small of her back, and slipped the rope over her shoulders and under her arms. She threw the other end of the line to Companion, telling him to catch her if she fell.

Companion pulled the slack out of the rope and braced himself. Grandmother walked across the section in question. She jumped up and down. She threw tier four force bolts at it. That was the highest tier force bolt she knew. Nothing moved.

“Yeah,” stepping back over the rail onto ‘safe’ ground. She took off the rope and started taking the knot out. “I think the tier five spell is the key, it won’t open without it.”

“If it is like the sewer covers in the industrial area,” Todd commented, “it will only take a tier four spell to open it from below.”

“Probably,” Grandmother responded. “How do we get below?”

“The dumper opens it. One of us could ride the rock load down,” Todd replied sarcastically. Grandmother looked around the track, at both walls and finally at the ceiling.

“It might work,” she said. “Someone could wait on the ceiling using water adhesion. If they dropped at the last second when the load was almost through, they would follow it through the hole. If they cast float, they should survive the fall.”

“Sounds like a job for you, brother,” Alex called to Companion.

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“No, no, no…” Companion sang in a high voice. The selkie’s fear of heights almost overwhelmed him. Grandmother thought he was getting better. They lowered and raised him to and from the high platform entrance to the industrial area multiple times. They didn’t even have to blindfold him anymore.

“It will have to be me then,” Alex concluded. Only Alex and Companion could cast float. The spell used the six symbol and they both sang it. Grandmother wondered if she could learn to cast float on herself using the butcher's foot tapping method.

“How many tier four force spells do you know?” Grandmother asked. The answer was going to be none. There wasn’t time since he reached tier four to learn more than heal, if that.

Alex mumbled something.

“What are the other options?” Todd asked.

“We could try attacking the dumper after it opens the trap door. If we defeat it maybe the door will remain open,” Sarah suggested.

“We could follow other dumpers and try to find a trap door that uses a spell we know,” Ellen offered.

“Both of those plans have possibilities. Although the second may take a very long time with no real guarantee of success,” Grandmother commented. “This dumper was outpacing me when I kept to the group’s pace. Sarah, you’re our slowest runner, I wonder if you can learn to cast swift on yourself using the butcher's tap method? You probably couldn’t recast once we were moving, but it lasts fairly long. Alex, can you cast swift on her? I’d ask Companion but he’s already casting it on himself. The time it takes to cast it twice might be too long.”

“I can try,” Alex said. “We’ll need to change the march order.”

“You and Todd can switch for a while,” Grandmother offered.

“Is that our plan then?” Todd asked. “Find another dumper and follow it?”

“We’ll wait here for a while. This dump shaft must be a semi-permanent feature. I’m going to mark it on my map. If we wait long enough I think another dumper will come along. We’ll try attacking it after it starts to dump first. When we take it apart, let’s do a detailed search for any kind of key it might be carrying to open the chute, like the digger’s light. It could be something on the underside of the cart,” Grandmother explained. “We can all try to learn a tap version of swift while we wait,” Grandmother commented. “Or float, it is also a cast on self spell, so maybe the butcher’s method will work with it too.”

Since swift wasn’t a combat spell, they didn’t need to find an opponent to learn it. After each try at casting it, they took off at a run. They made sure there were no traps in the section of tunnel they were running in before they started. Companion acted as instructor, starting with the tier zero version. An hour later they could all cast the tier zero, one and two versions. Grandmother learned them all quickly. It took longer to learn higher tier spells, but as a person’s tier increased it took less repetitions to learn the lower tier spells. Grandmother suspected she was down to some kind of minimum number of repetitions for tier zero and one spells.

Sarah went on to try to learn the tier three version. It would take her a while, since she was the same tier as the spell. Grandmother decided to invest her time in trying to learn float. Float was a tier three spell. There was no lower tier version of it. To learn it a player needed to be tier three and know a tier two spell in the same magic tree, which swift was.

Float also wasn’t a combat spell. It was one of the spells that Speedwell science couldn’t explain. To learn it, Grandmother needed to fall after each cast. She pulled random pieces of bronze tubing out of her bag that they gathered from killing a digger earlier in the day, and put together a small step. She would step up onto the bar, tap the spell on herself and step off. Companion acted as her instruction, stepping up, singing the spell, stepping off and floating to the floor. Having an instructor should shorten the amount of tries it took to learn the spell. At this low drop, Companion’s fear of heights didn’t make an appearance. Watching him, Grandmother wondered if she slowly increased the height would that help him with his fear or make it worse?

Her step wasn’t the most elaborate construction. On the uneven rock floor of the tunnel it wobbled each time she stepped on it. Grandmother had an idea. She stopped her attempts to learn float. She disassembled her step and started working on a different construction. She pulled more bronze components out of her bag as she built up a long assembly. She laid the assembly down over the trap door between the rails.

The finished construction was a flat panel, braced with tubing across the center. She attached two long tubes on the ends at one side of the width. The panel lay within the dust lines, while the long extensions reached past it. She hoped that when the trap door opened, the panel would rotate, dropping down into the hole, wedging it open. The risk was that the dumper would sense the blockage and not open the trap door.

“Something’s coming,” Companion called. He had his face pressed against the rail, using his sensitive whiskers to sense vibrations. Everyone stopped what they were doing, and took up positions along the wall. Grandmother shoved her last few spare parts into her bag and secured it to her pack. She picked up her staff from where she leaned it against the wall and took her position in the center.

“Wait until it stops,” Grandmother observed. “When the rumble starts, I’ll hit it with tier four force darts to push it off the rails.” The machines were much easier to kill off the rails. It was like the rails powered them. They usually used the rail car’s own momentum to help derail them. At a stop the dumper wouldn’t have any momentum. Grandmother cast conceal on all of them. Grandmother squatted down. She wanted to hit the dumper at an upper angle to encourage it to roll off the tracks.

The dumper came rolling up. Something about its slow approach made it seem even bigger. It stopped. Grandmother held her breath, hoping it wasn’t detecting her construction. There were a couple thumps and the rumble started.

Grandmother started casting. The darts pounded into the cart, denting the side. The cart started to tilt away from her as the wheels on this side lifted. Each successive dart had more effect. Grandmother realized she was using force darts, so as the dumper emptied it lost mass, they became more effective.

Companion stepped forward and using a side swing, buried his ax into the end of the cart that contained the mounted robot. The impact of his blow, added to Grandmother’s bolts, caused the two wheels still on the far side to jump.

Everyone jumped in. There were no rats. They closed all the small tunnels during their long wait.

The dumper was defeated fairly easily once off the tracks. Companion touched the cart. Their payout appeared, confirming the kill. Grandmother walked over and looked down at the chute. The door was closed, or mostly closed. Her framework was shoved into the center. It had rotated as she hoped it would. The panel section was firmly in the hold of two doors that had slid into position from the sides.

“What is that?” Todd asked. Tapping the straight pole that was all that remained visible of Grandmother's construction. Grandmother glanced around to find Ellen and Sarah on watch this time.

“Something I put together that I hoped would jam the door open. I guess I visualized the door opening the other direction,” Grandmother said, waving her hands to mime the action. “I assumed that because there isn’t enough edge next to the rails to hang something there.”

“If we built a square frame we could make internal leaves that fall down using the spin components,” Alex suggested.

“I wonder if it was just bad luck,” Todd said, “or if the door adjusted to the obstruction to close as much as it could.”

“Hmm…” Grandmother murmured. She was chiding herself for not thinking of the spinners. Alex was carrying a bag with a handful of them. “With a square frame and the spinners we could make a frame that drops leaves in both directions, leaving an open square in the center. As long as it didn’t adjust and start pushing the door up from below.”

Alex kicked the end of the frame, trying to decide how stuck it was. Grandmother thought she saw a flicker of movement in the door. Grandmother didn’t think another dumper would come with the wreck here. To experiment with a different trap door jammer they were going to have to chase down another one. She decided they needed to try as much as they could at this site before moving on.

“It’s not sealed. I wonder if we can lever it open,” Grandmother commented. “Let’s salvage the dumper and look for an opening key. If we don’t find anything we can use the dumper components to pry the door open.”