Castle dungeon. Guard barracks. Shack in the slums. Manor house. Outside town. I’d made a whole bunch of guesses about where we were being taken, but they were all proven wrong when we were lead into a fairly upscale store. A place called Sollus Brokerage, by the sign above the entrance, though that sounded less like a store and more like a merchant guild office or a company headquarters to me, which was a bit concerning. The local lord, the local guard, and a large scale business? Mia’s heroism was looking like more of a pain every minute.

The inside was well furnished and populated by a small number of well dressed clients, each with their own attendant sharply dressed in what was probably the store’s uniform. The goods on display looked expensive, and the place had both a receptionist and a sales counter, and my map showed a lot of what looked like meeting rooms. In all the place looked very well off, with a lot of resources. That probably meant that not only were they on the take from the local lord, but whoever owned the place ran a pretty competent business. Competent people were so much more annoying to deal with as enemies that I’d far rather just come to some mutual understanding, but that wasn’t going to be possible this time.

We passed through the main area without more than a glance from anyone in the place, and entered a back hallway that seemed to end in stairs down. From a brief glance at my map, there were several icons for stairs that lead both up and down, which left me curious about what was on those other levels. I hadn’t figured out how to ping the floors I wasn’t on yet, which meant it either just wasn’t an option, or I hadn’t unlocked it. Or I was an idiot and didn’t know what I was doing.

That was always possible.

As we neared what looked at first like a dead end, I glanced back at Mia where she’d been silently trailing behind me since we began this trek. For the life of me I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Which was precisely why she was the hero and not me. Heroes were idealistic busybodies by nature. Good natured fools who believed in a better world and fought to make it so. I would’ve been perfectly content to brush these guys off and go on about our lives, or work with them for the right incentives, but now we were stuck in it. Who knew how far we’d end up going?

Not me, that was sure, and I’d be the one to do all the going. Well no, that was old thinking. Mia and I would both be going wherever she led us, I was just concerned that neither of us knew where that path would end. No help for it though, so no sense wasting time on worry.

Of more immediate concern was that we were no doubt going to find immense suffering down wherever we were going. Were we going to be responsible for whoever we found? Was it on us to help them overcome their trauma, find new lives, and new homes? Not to mention that if this was just the entry point for some kind of flesh trade, we could end up following the threads for that. Then what? Bust up the whole operation? Arrest slavers and oust the nobles behind them? Change the systems or the laws of this town, this nation? The list of potential things we could be roped into was endless, and I wasn’t really that interested in dealing with any of them.

I sighed as a false wall was propped open and two of the guards began working together to open an absurdly over-designed door. That feeling I’d had, that this was looking to be a really big deal, seemed more and more justified. I didn’t want to get wrapped up in the main plot on the first day at level one! I couldn’t help but recall all those stupid unskippable cutscenes in games I’d played, the worst kind that refused to let me go out and grind first. Absolutely unbearable design, and here I was living it.

Well, whatever. Reality had never exactly been fair to me, so this was just par for the course. A course Mia had set, I was forced to remind myself. My job was just to figure out how to make her plans work, whatever they might be. I’d probably have to call in our patron to deal with the political back end, since we certainly didn’t have the connections for that. But that was for later, it wasn’t particularly urgent and I didn’t really have much to go on yet.

An overly hot waft of moist air slapped me in the face the moment the two guards finally manage to heave the door open. I clapped a hand over my nose, but it was too late. The wind was laden with promises of sewer, smoke, sweat, urine, and a hint of sex, but nothing in the way of blood, rot, or death. This was going to be nasty, but not as much as I feared. Trafficking with a side of indulgence, rather than the deeper depravities I’d read in the history books and seen on the news in far away places, back before.

Among the countless reports that had once reached me every day, there had been a few involving networks of predators being discovered and made public. Back then dealing with such situations had just meant a few words to the right people, but now I was going to get up close in personal. I wondered if that would help me understand the impulse. I’d had the opportunity to indulge in such things if I’d ever wanted to, I’d just never seen the point. Absolute waste of time, I’d always thought, since there’d always been far more interesting ways to enjoy myself. I had to wonder what hobbies Mia would develop as we made our journeys, and to what degree things like a flesh trade might affect that.

I just hoped Mia would take it all in stride.

There didn’t seem to be any lights once we passed through the doorway and into the secret area, but my map clearly said there were stairs. I truly hoped they were wooden, because smashing through them would be absolutely amazing. I’d be laughing for hours about it, no doubt. Unfortunately, when the sneeringly haughty lead guard used some kind of Spell to light the way down, it revealed that the stairs were made of solid stone.

I was a little sad about that, but it would have been a big distraction and probably interfered with any heroism that Mia intended anyway, so whatever. Well, assuming she intended much of anything at all. Every time I checked on her she was a half step behind me, practically hiding in my skirts, and had the vacant stare of someone lost in deep thought. Or she would be if I ever wore skirts. They were cute and I wasn’t, so I’d never taken to them.

I was glad Mia trusted me enough to be so vulnerable, but I’d definitely need to have a talk with her about being wary in dangerous circumstances. It was possibly an issue of her taking my cue, since I was neither concerned nor excited about any of this. How could I be when I knew the outcome already? We’d rescue whoever needed rescue and escape. The only thing to really look forward to was the distinct possibility that these guards, and all their compatriots too, would try to get in our way. Oh I really hoped they would. Even though they seemed really weak, I hadn’t had the chance to just have fun and cut loose in a long time, so I’d wasn’t about to refuse any opportunity to indulge myself.

Weak or not, they would still present a threat to Mia, so her being completely relaxed couldn’t be justified. Perhaps the problem was more in what they were, rather than what they represented, since they were people and not monsters, and that might have been why she wasn’t as on guard as she should have been. In that case, I could hope that this whole event would serve as a lesson that people were, in truth, often the worst sorts of monsters.

I would know, I’d had to put a few down before I could seize power for myself, and afterwards too. That had been long before I’d come to this place, so it was absolutely possible I might get a little thrill out of getting to do that all again. Become a revolutionary and then settle in as the tyrant in turn. It could be a lot of fun! At least, it would be if Mia let me, but I really didn’t think she would. That was, of course, the entire reason I needed her though, so I couldn’t be too put out about it. No doubt I’d be deposed before too long if I went that route, and that whole running for my life business had never been much fun, it was just too hard to resist that temptation on my own.

Unfortunately for any such fantasies of mine, these particular men were far less grand than the villains I’d known. They were petty and small, with all the dictatorial aspirations of a schoolmarm and the myopic obsession with hedonism to match. We were, after all, being led – technically by force! – into some sort of dungeon for clearly wicked and nefarious purposes. It really was a laugh when I thought about it.

The jarring clack of my estoc bouncing off a step reminded me that we hadn’t yet been disarmed. The whole way over I was surreptitiously tagging every single item we both owned so that they would show up on my map for later collection. It wasn’t something that had been listed in the Skill’s description, but I was discovering a number of functions like that. Hidden little tricks that put me at a distinct disadvantage compared to natives who would no doubt know all the ins and outs already. I’d probably need to find myself someone I could use to get access to that kind of information, presumably someone easily manipulated or indebted to me.

That was for another time. In the immediate moment I was pretty annoyed that we were being treated so lightly. That I was being treated with such disregard. I deserved better than that. But I had to suppose it would damage the illusion of peacefully going somewhere with the guards if they took our stuff while we were out in the open, and we did promise to go with them. But even as we marched down the stairs into the increasingly hot and humid underground, none of them seemed the slightest bit concerned. It was vexing. In fact the longer I thought about it, the more angry I was becoming. Were they seriously looking down on me that much?

Really?

Then it hit me. Mia’s Ability, [Comfort]. I hadn’t given it much thought, but that was almost certainly playing a role. It had been given to her because, frankly, we both needed it, being what we were and all. Being around Mia made people feel like things would work out, and with that in mind, no doubt the men just felt like it was alright to leave us armed and to not be too pushy about anything. That thought took the edge off my pique, though maybe that was [Comfort] too. Either way I didn’t care after a moment and just moved on.

The steps spiraled down and down until the walls practically wept — and so did my poor nose. When we finally reached what seemed like the bottom, two of the guards finally took our weapons and packs and peeled off towards a door on one side. A map ping revealed the layout of the whole place, showing that the door lead to a short series of rooms, probably storage and where the guards stayed. It also resolved my questions about the jungle-like atmosphere. The whole underground area was some kind of converted cave system and, if I was reading the little indicator icons right, a natural volcanic hot spring as well. Why they chose the place was beyond me, but I was not about to let such an opportunity pass me by. Taking a nice dip in the springs was the least of what I was owed for all the inconvenience.

Mister easily-aggravated, the lead guard, escorted us further into the depths of the place, towards a cluster of strangely shaped rooms and a little blank spot that indicated an entrance further down among the branching paths in the caves. We soon passed by the seemingly useless rooms, apparently just the work of geology and not of intent, and moved on towards that downward indicator.

Given my total lack of tension, and the absolute silence that the guards had kept during our entire journey so far, I was a bit surprised when the one behind us shoved me towards a hole in the ground. Or tried to, at least. He mostly just shoved himself backwards with a startled grunt before falling on his backside. I looked down on him, or even more down on him given the difference in our standing heights, and tried not to laugh.

The only light was the guard’s Spell, which made it difficult to see well. Where it shone it was sharp and actinic, casting miserably deep shadows everywhere it didn’t. Fortunately I came equipped with a solution in the form of the living gold in my eyes. Concentrating on that I was able to see and, to my surprise, recognize the man’s essence; it was the fellow who’d wisely wanted to back off earlier in the street. He wasn’t such a bad guy, I thought. I offered a smile and a hand to help him up, but he practically shot backwards away from me and ended up against a wall. The abject rejection was a blow to my mood. I wasn’t threatening him or anything, so what was his problem? I wasn’t even armed!

Sure, he’d completely failed when he tried to push a seemingly-young girl into a dark hole deep under the ground in a place that stank of depraved abuses, but why compound that with being a coward now? Or, hm. Could be that manly shame thing. I had to suppose that, were I in his shoes, I’d be pretty embarrassed too. I really didn’t think a desperate butt scoot was going to make that any better, but that was just me.

“Las!” He cried to sir snotty while cringing, back pressed to the wall. The sudden shout in such a confined place made my ears ring, but didn’t prevent me from hearing the scrape of a suddenly drawn blade.

“Seriously?” I couldn’t help but ask as I turned to see the man holding a sad little bit of sharpened steel in the air between us.

“Stand away from him!” The man, no, the garbage demanded at excessive volume. Garbage was to be removed at the earliest convenience, and that was exactly what he’d earned from me. The way his screeching hurt my ears – again! – was wholly intolerable, and with that the last of my good humor evaporated.

I was getting pretty tired of accommodating everything that had been happening, my temper was edging towards red. I raked the hair out of my face because, in spite of the way I usually enjoyed it, even that was suddenly irritating to me. I wanted to do something fun. I wanted to be off in the forest fighting goblins. I wanted nothing to do with a flesh trade or politics or some asinine lord. I wanted away from this stench. I wanted this haughty holier than thou moronic piece of garbage, who couldn’t tell that he was about to die, to get his sword out of my face.

I switched my eyes to orichalcum to better see the magic of the world and, just like I’d practiced with my mentor, gathered the right types of mana into the only two bits of magic I knew. Catching the blade between my hands was easy enough, since he was just holding it there, and the Spells flowed into it the moment I touched the metal. A quick twist and the sword snapped with the ping of extreme thermal shock. The resulting metal shard I simply tossed on the ground before advancing.

I managed to take all of one step forward in my new quest to begin rectifying my list of problems when I felt a tug on my sleeve and heard a very faint voice calling me. I closed my eyes, letting them fade back to normal, and took as much of a breath as I could stomach in the fetid air before turning towards my golden girl.

“Yes, Mia?” I said as brightly as I could manage.

“Mia is scared.”

“That’s okay. Everyone gets scared sometimes,” I told her as I took her hands in mine.

“No, Mia is scared you’ll kill them.” Those big eyes really did see everything. I was once again reminded that I couldn’t just do as I pleased. Reminded that Mia was the hero. That she was the hero for a reason. The same reason I wasn’t, and never would be. She was young, naive, sweet, idealistic, and above all she tried to do the right thing. Me? I’d just do what was convenient. Expedient. Whatever I found amusing. Anything unpleasant was to be avoided or, better yet, eliminated. But Mia wasn’t like that, which was why she set the course. All I had to do was figure out how to make it work while staying on my leash.

“Well, do you know what it is you have to do?” After an endless moment in that dark place she nodded tremulously. “Good.” It was better than just good. It was everything. If she didn’t know, we were both lost.

“Don’t ever let me, or fear, or anything else, stop you from doing the right thing, okay?” She nodded again, but this time with all the strength of her convictions, determination plain even in the difficult light. I patted her hands and moved to stand behind her. Now that she had a plan, I was just going to follow along wherever she led. With the important things sorted, I took stock of the situation and noticed that neither of them had moved yet. Lieutenant garbage was still standing there, staring at his broken sword. Where had all that big boy bravado gone? Miserable cretin. The butt scooting partner was on his feet now, but still pressed against the wall and avoiding my eye.

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What an amusingly useless fellow.

“Mia doesn’t know why we’re here, but you wanted us to go down there, right?” There was no response for a long moment until suddenly the bossy dross waved his much foreshortened sword in our direction.

“Yes!” Is probably what he said. I could have been wrong of course, it was hardly my native tongue and was said in a much higher octave than he’d used earlier. More of a squeak than a word, really, but it sounded about right. He coughed and brandished the sword a little more.

“That is correct,” he tried again, this time far more clearly.

“Okay,” she said before immediately jumping in. There was a long silence, then a sizeable splash. I just sighed. I was able to estimate the depth now, since the map was no use for that, and it was clear that getting out without cheating was going to be a chore. With a little effort spent on my living sight I could see her essence, along with a number of others. I decided to make a little conversation while I waited for her to get out of my landing zone.

“You’re really lucky, you know? Not sure what she’s up to, but I am sure we’ll be back. When the time is right.” Ah, she moved.

“Until then!” I waved at them both before taking the plunge. I was weightless in the infinite dark for a small eternity, before being interrupted by a call that I absolutely was not expecting at that very moment.

"Hey, got a moment for me?"

"I always have time for me."

"Oh that’s cute. That’s real cute. I kinda like it."

“Thank you.”

“Anyway. Was doing a bit of stargazing, you know. Looking for anything I could compare.”

“And?”

“Nothing yet.”

“Damn. Not gonna be able to go home, huh?”

“Well, not to give you false hope but I’m still looking. I have some ideas for better tools, but we’ll see.”

“Yeah.” It was pretty unhappy news, to pile on an already unhappy moment. But the huge doofus couldn’t have called just to tell me that, and I said as much.

“Absolutely correct. So! That verbose mode thing, right? Blameless empress, it took forever for me to read through all that. This thing knows stuff, dude. Stuff it absolutely should not know.”

“Did you have to bring her up just now? Really?” I’d been trying so hard to avoid thinking about her, because it was too much to bear.

“Ah, sorry. Sorry. Genuinely sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Whatever, just. Yeah. It knew things about me, too. Go on.”

“Okay, you probably noticed that the system calls itself MARIA, right?”

“I did.”

“Get ready, because this is wild. It stands for Mana Augmented Reality Integration Assistant.”

“It what?”

“Yeah. What’s more, the system isn’t actually on right now from what I can tell. It’s in some kind of dormant state.”

“Well what does that mean?”

“Not a clue! Is it a game, is it a simulation, is it a prison? Lots of questions, and maybe the start of some answers, right?”

“Yeah not really! I just have more questions now!”

“Well tough, ‘cause that’s all I’ve got. Talk later.”

The call clicked off before I could respond. My mind was still churning along full force when I crashed through the unexpectedly shallow water feet first and cracked the stone beneath. It felt like I’d cracked the stone, at least, but I could well have just been imagining things since my head wasn’t completely together yet. That buffoon just loved to lay it on me and ditch. But whatever, I had other things to attend to.

Such as the small matter of being surrounded by slightly above body temperature air and water, which when combined with the absolute dark of the pit could fool the senses and even cause full blown hallucinations. It was something I was familiar with, as I’d regularly enjoyed floating in sensory deprivation tanks back before and it wasn’t so dissimilar from this prison. I could take that well or badly, it was my choice, and I chose both. Doubting my senses would make getting any work done real tough, but it could easily be a lot of fun to play with too. The work came first though, and that began with finding my golden girl.

“Mia?” I called, looking around for her essence in the dark. I’d expected to be punished for opening my mouth with an unbearable wall of stench, but the smell was actually a lot better down in that pit for some reason. I chose to shrug it off as an unexpected blessing, since it wasn’t immediately important. It took only a moment to locate her with the way she shone so brilliantly against the lesser sparks of the other captives. They had evidently been scattered around by the dangerous entrance we’d just made, or had been in the pit long enough to know that being in the landing zone wasn’t a great idea. Probably both.

“Mea! Your eyes are glowing!”

“Oh?” Hadn’t realized they did that. Living gold wasn’t a particularly unusual alchemical product in this world, and it certainly didn’t give off any light all on its own, but actively using its unique properties to see the elemental stuff of life apparently had unforeseen side effects. I immediately had to wonder if the orichalcum had the same issue. Glowing eyes were pretty cool, but I’d have to be careful about that since it was noticeable and would give away what I was doing. I relaxed and let the essence sight fade, trusting in my hearing to locate Mia in the dark.

“You doin’ alright?” I asked once we’d managed to find one another.

“I’m fine!” Her cheer was incredible, and I took heart from that. She was tough, more than I’d given her credit for, and it seemed like this experience wasn’t going to dampen her effervescent nature.

“Good. I did want to mention that it’s generally wiser to take some precautions before leaping into unknown places. What if someone had been standing here when you landed?” I couldn’t see her reaction to that, but I presumed she’d be thinking about it, as she usually did when I gave her advice. I gave her a moment before moving on.

“I got a look at that light Spell the guard used. I’m going to try and copy it, so give me a minute here.” I told her in a voice I was sure would carry to the others all around us. “There are a bunch of other people down here with us. See if they need any help, will you?” I continued in a whisper meant only for her. I couldn’t be seen taking the lead, now could I? I sat down slowly in the warm water, intent on getting a little joy out of the experience, but it came up only to my waist. Honestly! Anything less than submersion was a complete waste of time! Was it too much to ask for at least one nice thing in all this? Apparently yes. Whatever.

I tuned out the various splashings of our mysterious cell mates as they moved about the cavern in favor of concentrating on figuring out the light Spell. While I did have the mage class, it was only at level one. I didn’t have anything better than a crash course in magic, either. Still, I’d been able to see how the guard’s Spell was shaped in detail and though my memory wasn’t perfect anymore it was still good enough to get me started.

The first thing was to find the right kind of mana. Lleuli had described that as the hardest part of the process for a beginner, requiring meditation and stretching the senses beyond the self to find things purely by feel. Since I had [Mana Perception] as a gift from our patron, it was actually pretty easy for me. I just had to reach out and grasp whichever color of mana I happened to need and feed that into the Spell. They had actual names in the local language that sounded quite nice and also corresponded to the strange and otherworldly colors that they each possessed, but I just called them Up, Down, In, and Out. It was my own translation, but I preferred it since it was both simple and descriptive: Up increased energy, Down decreased it; In agglomerated, Out dispersed.

At least, that’s what they did of themselves, as evidenced by what happened when their normal atmospheric composition was knocked out of balance. It was obvious with just a glance around that Up was more heavily represented in these hot tunnels then normal, and back on the mountain there had been a really high concentration of In which made everything more dense and heavier. It was harder to breathe there, harder even to think, as though I’d been deep under water. Of them all, though, I’d been told that Out rich areas were the worst to live in. The air was thin and anyone who stayed there very long became deranged and sick, as everything else deteriorated into a fine dust.

I hadn’t used either In or Out yet, as the two Spells I knew were actually just a single shape using Up for heat and Down for cold. I suspected I could use the other two mana types in the same structure, but was wary of what might happen if I did. Lleuli hadn’t mentioned using them, and my active imagination told me that making some monster’s skin harder or turning my hand to dust trying to cast weren’t exactly great options. Not that I wouldn’t do some testing just to check, but I was busy at the moment with other things and my guild card did make me a licensed mage so I was free to just do that later.

The light Spell used both Up and In mana, so it was going to be a bit of a task to learn. The Up mana was shaped to produced light instead of heat, and it seemed like the In mana kept it anchored and coherent. There was plenty of both floating about in the dark, so I grasped hold of some with my own mana. It felt more like a phantom limb than anything, even if the status window called it mana. Lleuli called it mana too, so maybe that was right, but that just didn’t seem right to me. I hardly wanted to play the enlightened stranger with greater insight than the experts, but I couldn’t detect it with [Mana Perception] the way I could with the other four, and it just didn’t feel like I was expending units of something. Not that it really mattered, since it acted like a resource and I was more concerned with using magic than esoteric theories and minutia.

Now that I had hold of what I needed, the next thing I had to do was to fold it into shape. I had decent spatial cognition, but the shapes that magic required were surprisingly taxing. Not that the ones I’d seen so far were complicated, exactly, just that they required unbelievable precision. As in, I couldn’t believe how precise the stupid thing had to be! There were probably some tricks to it that I didn’t yet know, but I didn’t know them and therefore they were useless. I tried to keep the errant thoughts to a minimum as I folded and shaped the mana again and again, sometimes needing to gather more as my poor control let what I had slip away.

“Light,” I muttered, failing yet again. I’d been at it so long that my own reserves of mana were low and I was simmering with impotent rage about the impossibility of using protractors or rulers inside my head anymore. I let it all go, deciding to try once more from scratch. I took a deep breath, trying to find enough peace that I wouldn’t actually shake from rage, then gathered what I needed to try again. Every painstaking fold, every excruciating angle, I got angrier.

“[Light]!” I screamed, and all that boiling fury erupted in the form of a sudden day-bright light that blinded everyone, myself included, eliciting cries of surprise and causing me to drop the Spell. The wave of muttering that followed let me know that Mia, for her part, had seemingly collected everybody into one area and was talking to them.

“Sorry!” I called with all the cheer my success had brought. Now that I knew I could do it I felt completely refreshed and immediately focused on the Spell again. It came forth far more easily the second time around, and since I wasn’t angrily pushing on things I had enough control to give it the dimness of a single candle. Or maybe that was because it was system-official, I mused, looking at the notification that had shown up after the first one I’d cast.

“Mea, you did it!” My golden girl said as she slogged through the silty water towards me. With a look around I could tell why they’d dropped us in here. The sides were not just slick with moisture, but smoothed into the shape of a teardrop. The hot water and steam would give anyone working to escape heat stroke in minutes, and of course the dark made it impossible to coordinate effectively. The whole thing looked about half natural and half shaped, and that confirmed my worries about the resources and time that had been spent on this operation. The whole thing seemed to be designed to keep moderately powerful people imprisoned.

Like, say, adventurers.

I’d vaguely noticed a current to the water as I’d worked on my new Spell, and with light came confirmation. Hot spring water was visibly burbling up from the sands on one side of the room and slowly flowing down a slight decline before disappearing under a lip of rock. If things were constantly being flushed through then that certainly explained the lack of a waste smell. A fresh ping of my map unfortunately brought back mixed results. The water did seem to flow into another set of tunnels that may have been a sewage system, given how regularly they were shaped, but the passage between our chamber and the maybe-sewer was far too small for people and completely submerged on top of that. Plus, escaping via sewer? Disgusting. So much for that escape route.

“Of course!” I said with as much cool big sister mojo as I could manage. Well, she’d have to decide when, or perhaps even if, we were going to escape in the first place. I’d just have to take stock of the options until then.

“Come on, you have to meet everyone,” she said, pulling on my arm to get me on my feet and moving towards the huddled mass of young women. Ah, correction. Mostly women. It was a little tough to tell across different species and at such a young age, but I felt confidently sure that one of them at least was a pretty young boy. As we approached I floated my light up above everyone’s heads, since I saw a lot of squinting despite how objectively dim I’d made it. There were a lot of strange shadows as a result, but in spite of that there was no doubt that all of them were in a bad way. Inevitably they were soaked and bedraggled, but there was blatant evidence of malnutrition and recent abuses on most of them.

There was clothing, but it looked to me like the inexpensive kind worn under armor to keep it from chafing delicate skin or developing a smell. Even then, much of it was tattered or outright missing. If my eyes didn’t lie, then many of the more clothed among them had shared their underwear so that they could all maintain at least a little dignity. But maybe that kind of superficial dignity was all they had left. Attempts at dignity or not, their faces looked awful. Not a spark of hope among them, nothing but the the kind of empty despair I’d only seen in a documentary about some warlord’s harem back before.

“This is Ghoumi,” Mia said, introducing a truly tiny woman. “I said we were going to escape, and then she asked how but Mia doesn’t know, but Mea does! So she wanted to talk for everyone since she’s been here longest.” It was nice to see her being so proactive about things, certainly saved me the trouble. The representative girl seemed like she might have been a dwarf, but even then she was pretty small. Not underage, by my eye, but it was hard to tell. I glanced again at the elf boy and darkly wondered at the tastes of the people running this.

“We’re gonna get everyone free from here, and punish the ones that did it, and find out how far this all goes, too!” I had to admire Mia’s enthusiasm for all this, even if she dreamed pretty big. Well, that just meant it was on me to figure out how to fulfill big dreams.

“Hello. You may call me Mea. I have a few questions I’d like to ask.” I had to look very far down to meet her eye, but I didn’t want to demean her by kneeling or squatting. She was an adult, even if she was small. I began to feel my shoulders stiffening under all the weight of the silence that followed.

“If you’re willing.” I added, hoping to coax a response. Maybe she was shy? She’d evidently spoken to Mia, but my golden girl didn’t count. Mia had recently made friends with a stump. I hastily shoved that to the back of my mind, because the whole incident didn’t bear remembering.

I refocused and gestured us towards a different part of our shared prison, away from the others. It was possible that this Ghoumi girl might find it easier to talk if we weren’t surrounded by people who’d been through the same suffering. That didn’t sound quite right to me, but I wasn’t a trauma psychologist or anything. In any case she was irrelevant to me; so long as I got my answers I was ready and willing to accommodate her however she needed.

Ghoumi immediately followed along when I moved away from the group, even though moving through the water seemed like a real slog for her. Maybe she really was just timid? I decided to leave the light floating above the gathering, for Mia’s sake, but that ended up making it really difficult to see Ghoumi’s expression. That kind of thing was pretty important, especially if I wanted to get useful information out of this self-proclaimed speaker for the prisoners. She sure seemed gloomy though, and those eyes were just completely dead. Spooky.

Gloomy Ghoumi, eh? It was time for a little questioning, but people like that needed a different approach than normal, so I took a moment to reorder my thinking a bit.