Just as Benjamin was getting a serious case of the willies from those unblinking eyes, the owner of said peepers suddenly spoke up from the other side of the iron door:

"Shh, I just managed to send Jessica on a fool's errand, but she'll be back any minute. I can't linger."

It was a gentle, womanly voice. It tickled something in the back of Benjamin's mind, but he couldn't quite place it.

"Who the heck is this?" he mentally prodded the AI.

"It's your dear mother, genius," the AI replied dryly.

"…"

With the AI's oh-so-helpful reminder, the pieces finally clicked into place for Benjamin. The owner of that voice was none other than Marie - Claude's wife, the old lady's daughter-in-law, and Benjamin's own mother. The very same Marie who had briefly spoken up in the living room earlier.

His mother had given his jailer the slip to come check on him in secret.

According to the abridged version of his backstory the AI had so graciously provided, Marie was the very model of a loving wife and mother, renowned throughout the capital for her gentle temperament. In all his years, Benjamin had never once seen her lose her cool or clash with anyone - well, anyone except the old battleaxe.

And even when the old lady (who had a notable lack of affection when it came to her daughter-in-law) constantly needled and nettled Marie, she never retaliated in kind. She simply endured the endless barbs and jabs without a word of complaint. By the standards of the age, she was the perfect "good wife".

When it came to Benjamin, Marie didn't play favorites just because he was the resident disappointment. She doted on him and Grantt equally, with great care and attention. In a world where even children of similar aptitude often inspired blatant favoritism in their parents, Marie's fair treatment was nothing short of remarkable.

Thinking of this, Benjamin wasted no time putting on his best "woe is me" act:

"Mother, you came at last," he whimpered, voice trembling with pathos. Sure, he wasn't outright complaining, but that forlorn tone and pitiful timbre spoke volumes.

He could only hope it was enough to stir his mother's boundless sympathy.

"Oh, my poor dear. Your father just stepped out, so I took the chance to slip down and see you. Here, you must be absolutely famished. I had Cook prepare some extra bread for you. It's not much, but it'll keep you going until this all blows over." As expected, Marie did not disappoint. As she spoke, she passed a small paper parcel through the door flap.

Benjamin's heart leaped with joy. He accepted the parcel with shaking hands, carefully unfolding it to reveal two soft, warm rolls nestled within, their tantalizing aroma of yeast and milk wafting up to greet him.

Merciful heavens, was that actual food?

Benjamin teared up on the spot, overcome with emotion.

Though every fiber of his being urged him to immediately devour those delicious rolls, he managed to wrestle his baser hunger-driven instincts into submission. Fixing those big blue eyes framed in the doorway with a look of profound gratitude, he warbled:

"Thank you, I was at death's door."

Marie's eyes crinkled with a smile. "No need to wolf it all down at once, dear. Come tomorrow, once your father's anger has cooled, I'll appeal to his better nature and plead your case. He's sure to release you from this gloomy cell before long, don't you fret. He's not so heartless as to leave you to waste away down here indefinitely."

Benjamin exhaled a sigh of relief at her words, feeling some of the tension drain from his shoulders. If he was stuck in this potato purgatory for too long, it would seriously hinder his plans to secretly learn magic. The sooner he could breathe free air again, the sooner he could send Jeremy to uncover Annie's parting gifts.

Plus, while a bit of solitary reflection was all well and good, any longer and he'd be climbing the walls from sheer boredom. Heck, he'd only been stewing in this cramped space for a couple hours at most, and already the mere sight of those infernal tubers was driving him up the wall.

A few more days of this and he'd be sprouting spuds from his ears.

"Alright, I'd best take my leave before Jessica returns and catches me consorting with the prisoner. Be careful not to let on that you had any visitors." Marie's eyes darted away for a moment, seemingly scanning for any signs of impending discovery, before returning to the door. "You'll be in my every prayer, my love."

"Thank you for everything, Mother. Until we meet again," Benjamin intoned solemnly, summoning a well of sincere gratitude from deep within.

"Until then, my dearest boy."

With that tender farewell and a faint pattering of retreating footsteps, Marie gently closed the flap, leaving Benjamin alone with his thoughts and his new best friends: the basketful of bread.

Working quickly, he tore into the toothsome rolls like a man possessed. They were a hearty pair, no stingy prison rations by any stretch, but to a ravenous young nobleman with a yawning void where his stomach used to be, no bounty could ever be bountiful enough. In a twinkling, all that remained were a few pitiful crumbs and an empty twist of paper. Giving his belly a contented pat, Benjamin let loose a mighty belch of pure satisfaction.

Crumpling the incriminating evidence into a tiny ball, he buried it deep within the sea of spuds, safely concealed from prying eyes.

With the gnawing beast of hunger decisively slain (for the moment), he collapsed backwards into his potato pile with a gusty sigh. Lids fluttering closed, he felt his consciousness begin to drift, an inexorable tide pulling him down into fathomless depths…

He had no intention of sitting on his hands and wasting precious time in this basement cell. Since he had nothing better to do, he figured he might as well take the opportunity to further explore his mindscape and that enigmatic blue "triangle" symbol. Just because he lacked a proper magical mentor didn't mean he couldn't take the self-guided approach to arcane mastery.

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After all, wasn't his entire magical journey thus far a testament to the power of autodidacticism?

Of course, Benjamin had briefly considered practicing the one spell he'd actually managed to learn - the humble Water Ball. In most fantasy novels he'd read, the simplest way to train a newfound power was to use it over and over until it became second nature. But given his current location, a stone's throw from the cathedral, he couldn't risk drawing unwanted attention. If the "Cleansers" could indeed sense nearby magic, as Michelle had claimed, then casting any spells topside was a surefire way to rouse the Church's suspicions - and invite his own untimely demise.

If he wanted to sneak in any magical target practice, it would have to be within the confines of his mindscape.

He'd already used Water Ball once before in that mental realm, with Michelle standing right beside him none the wiser. Surely a cathedral several streets away wouldn't pick up on any extradimensional shenanigans.

The mindscape… what an utterly bizarre place.

Though Benjamin was fuzzy on the exact methodology of Michelle and her ilk's magical training, his gut told him they didn't have access to a mental plane quite like his, let alone a set of tidy symbological building blocks to represent the underlying concepts. Chances were, their path to magedom had been a markedly different beast altogether.

Through sheer happenstance (and no shortage of floundering), he seemed to have stumbled onto a most atypical road to power.

This realization only served to further pique Benjamin's curiosity about the nature of his mindscape. And so, with nothing but time and tubers on his hands, he once more slipped into that familiar headspace.

In the boundless expanse of his inner world, everything was just as he'd left it. The impenetrable darkness, the soft blue glow of the floating triangle… It was as if the space had crystallized the moment it first came into being, untouched by the passage of time.

The only thing that had changed was Benjamin himself.

Ever since his run-in with the would-be assassin, when he'd unlocked his Water Elemental Sensing ability, he'd noticed a marked increase in his sensitivity to aquatic energy. Even now, the once-faint tendrils of water magic permeating the mindscape were thrown into stark relief, practically luminous to his inner eye. He took a moment to slip back into the waking world, focusing his newfound perception on the trickle of ambient water energy suffusing his dank basement cell.

A quick comparison confirmed his suspicions - the elemental concentration within his mindscape was significantly higher than that of the outside world.

Popping back into the mental realm, Benjamin paused for a beat, a sudden whim overtaking him. Turning his back on the blue triangle, he took off at a dead sprint into the yawning void. As the cerulean light receded behind him, he could feel the density of the surrounding water magic steadily decreasing with each bounding step - an elemental gradient rendered in stark chiaroscuro.

Soon, the all-consuming blackness was his only companion, so thick he couldn't see his hand in front of his face.

Yet somehow, this lightless expanse didn't fill Benjamin with dread or unease. If anything, he felt an odd sense of kinship with the enveloping dark.

And so he ran on, his curiosity not yet sated. Though his theory about the elemental dispersion had been soundly confirmed, a new question gnawed at the edges of his thoughts: did this mindscape have any discernible boundaries? Would he eventually hit some sort of wall if he just kept running? What secrets might lurk within this sea of shadows, patiently waiting to be stumbled upon?

The drive to probe the unknown was deeply human, after all. Whether venturing out into the vast reaches of the cosmos or spelunking the deepest caverns of the soul, mankind was forever chasing that tantalizing promise of fresh discovery, yearning to uncover what lay beyond the next horizon.

And so Benjamin forged ahead, into the waiting dark.

Then proceeded to make a prize fool of himself.

"Heavens above, what kind of fever dream is this?!"

After what felt like an eternity spent locked in a madman's marathon, Benjamin was finally forced to admit defeat. Doubled over, hands braced on his knees, he gasped for breath, gawking at the unbroken expanse of obsidian nothingness stretching out before him.

He'd initially assumed that the mindscape operated on dream logic, that niggling limitations like physical stamina wouldn't apply to this purely cerebral space. It was a perfectly reasonable supposition - the brain was hardly a muscle in the traditional sense. Why would a mental construct care one whit about cardiovascular endurance?

But alas, he'd thought wrong.

It seemed the sages of old had the right of it after all: the material formed the very bedrock of the ethereal. Push the mind past its breaking point, and the body was sure to pay the price.

In this infinite sprawl of a mental landscape, he'd been running for gods only knew how long, crossing mile after untold mile… yet never catching so much as a glimpse of an endpoint. No matter how far he traveled, his surroundings remained a seamless tapestry of black, black, and more black.

It wasn't until his muscles were screaming bloody murder and his joints felt like they'd been pumped full of molten lead that he was forced to concede defeat, not a single sign of an outer boundary in sight.

"You do realize that the scope of human imagination is effectively limitless, yes? Searching for a tidy little 'You Are Here' marker in the fathomless depths of your own psyche is an exercise in futility," the AI suddenly piped up, its atonal voice echoing through the void.

"Chalk it up to a burning curiosity," Benjamin replied with a wheezing shrug.

"More like chalk it up to abject boredom," the AI shot back, its mechanical monotone somehow dripping with disdain.

"…"

Benjamin was too winded to muster a proper comeback.

Besides, the AI had a point. He HAD just scarfed down a hearty meal. And he WAS decidedly lacking in the entertainment department.

In the end, Benjamin abandoned his grand ambitions of plumbing the depths of his mindscape. With a thought, he popped back into the waking world, only to dive right back into the cognitive plane a heartbeat later. This time, he materialized right back at the blue triangle's side, the floating rune's gentle radiance welcoming him like an old friend. In an instant, he could once more feel the currents of water magic thrumming all around him, as thick and heady as incense.

Hard not to feel a slight pang at the thought of all that painstaking exploration amounting to little more than wasted effort.

But Benjamin's attention was quickly monopolized by a far more tantalizing prospect.

Ever the inveterate optimist, he was never one to let a little setback sour him on the joys of empirical experimentation. So what if his first foray had ended in a bust? There were plenty more metaphysical fish to fry:

Extending an open palm towards the blue triangle, he mentally intoned the words of power that would call forth the Water Ball. As the runic symbol trembled with eldritch potential and columns of water magic swirled around his outstretched hand, the shimmering orb took shape before his eyes. Without hesitation, he released his mental hold on the projectile, dismissing it into motes of mana, only to immediately re-cast the spell…

Again and again, he loosed Water Ball after Water Ball into the abyss of his mindscape. Ripples of azure light bloomed and spread like pond scum with each casting, the surging tides of elemental energy cresting and breaking against the shores of his psyche.

It didn't take long before Benjamin noticed a distinct thinning of the ambient water magic, a recession of the once-abundant elemental seas. But he didn't let that stop him - if anything, it only spurred him to redouble his efforts.

By the forty-fifth consecutive casting, he found that the shimmering sphere refused to coalesce in his waiting palm. Not only that, but a sudden spike of pain lanced through his skull, rudely ejecting him from the mindscape in a graceless tumble.

For the first time, he found himself unceremoniously dumped back into the real world against his will.

And yet, even as his head throbbed with unaccustomed agony, Benjamin could barely contain the giddy excitement thrumming through his every word:

"I've got it!"

"…Gotten what, precisely?" the AI finally replied after a long moment, clearly reluctant to play along. "I know I'm going to regret asking, but I suppose I'm honor-bound to humor you. So by all means, do enlighten me."

Benjamin paid the snarky rejoinder no mind, too caught up in the heady rush of his latest epiphany to care. He all but vibrated with scholarly satisfaction, grinning like a madman who'd just made a groundbreaking discovery, hooting and hollering like a student who'd aced an exam through sheer dumb luck.

He gleefully crowed to the unfeeling cosmos:

"The secret to a mage's training! I've cracked the code!"