Broken Lands

Chapter 342 – Invitation

Sophia woke to Dav silently crying in their room the next morning. “Hey there, is something wrong?”

Dav shook his head. “No, no, it’s just a dream.” 

He rubbed his left hand below his left eye, brushing the tears away, and added, “My parents will know I’m missing by now. They may think I’m dead, I’m not sure. It depends on how Carleton Studio handled what happened. Assuming that the people I was working for even were Carleton Studio; everything matched and I was working in the Carleton headquarters, but the more I think about it, the more I come to realize that it wasn’t.”

Sophia settled next to him on the bed. She wasn’t sure if she should reassure him about his parents or not, so she focused on his last statement instead. “Who do you think it was, then?”

Dav shrugged, then blinked the remaining tears out of his eyes. “Someone who could figure out how to reach another world then get Carleton Studios to work with them to bring in people who didn’t know what was going on to explore, maybe after sending a few people of their own through. Which probably means they don’t have access to a lot of people; if they did, they wouldn’t need outsiders who don’t know what’s going on.”

He snorted and a grin crossed his face. “Not that bringing us in would be as helpful as I’m sure they thought it would be, even without me getting thrown into another universe. At least half the testers depend on assistive tech you don’t have, because it’s not a game. Most of the rest do at least some mild world-hacking. That’s … hells, I thought the game was unusually good at keeping me out before we ended up here, but it was just that your systems use different protocols!”

Dav’s grin faded a bit and Sophia was suddenly certain that he was thinking of his parents again. This definitely answered a question she’d had running around in her head more than once in the past two years. “When we get out of here, when we figure out how to go home, we’re going to your home first. My parents know I’m alive; they’re not worried about me. Well, not any more worried than any other time I’ve been out of touch for a while. Which I guess has never been this long; even Jenna sends messages home when she travels. Anyway! We’re going to your home first.”

Dav closed his eyes and nodded, then leaned against Sophia. She took that to mean that he didn’t actually want to talk about it, so she wrapped her arms around him and held him until he stirred. It took a while.

“We should get moving,” Dav finally said as he stood. “There’s an Arena fight this afternoon; before that, I want to talk to Jax about our schedule. It’s great that we’re making money and living well, but we’ll never make it to the third upgrade if we never get more than one or two zones into the Maze.”

That wasn’t exactly true; there were many teams that did exactly that, fitting their trips into the Maze around their Arena schedule. They were usually even closer to the third upgrade than Sophia’s team was when they started, and they planned to spend years gathering the Wisps they needed to even qualify to try to advance. It would be even longer for Sophia’s team, and that was without the fact that a significant fraction of their “trips to the Maze” were actually visits to Tiwaz to talk to him or supply monsters for the next simulated breakdown of the Arena’s healing system.

Even so, Dav definitely had a point. Despite gaining some Wisps from the Arena fights and more from the few Maze visits they did manage, they’d gained fewer Wisps in the time since the expedition than they had on the expedition. Even if that trip was unusual because they encountered the Tower of Aura Weight and did extremely well, it was clear that trips deeper into the Maze were more rewarding. They couldn’t yet go as deep as the expedition did, but they could go a lot deeper than they had been if they had the time.

Dav was already talking to Jax about it by the time Sophia saw them, so that made it easy.

That evening, Jax announced that he’d arranged a longer break for them from the Arena fights so that they could spend a tenday in the Maze. It meant missing the next seasonal dyleda championship, but that was the best time for them to be gone; the Arena would be closed to fights for several days. To extend the break to a tenday, Jax had to choose between missing the last fight before the championship and missing the first fight of the new season. His decision was made for him when their manager offered him the official opening fight of the season. They’d have to make sure to be back in time, but the amount they were promised was worth it.

Sophia found that she actually regretted missing the championship. The game was confusing, but a lot of fun to watch and she thought she was starting to figure it out. There were a number of dyleda courts underground in the professional area, though, and she occasionally had time to watch a match there. She’d even had the chance to play a few times. She lost horribly, of course, but it was fun.

Five days later, Jax returned from picking up their daily winnings with a thoughtful expression on his face. He called everyone together to give them the news. “We’ve been invited to join the Blade for the final match of the dyleda championship. It would require cutting our planned expedition into the Maze shorter by three days.”

“And you think it might help you with your search?” Sophia guessed. That was one of only two reasons she could think of to agree, and the other one was only money.

“Not directly, but it should lead to better information or access. Not going will almost certainly result in having more trouble scheduling matches we want and might prevent ever getting the information I want legitimately.” Jax paused, then admitted, “I’ve guessed wrong about the Blade in the past, but I haven’t yet gone wrong in assuming that she wouldn’t pay back a slight, and turning down an invitation to the championship match would absolutely count.”

“Seven days, then?” Dav spoke before Sophia could. She kept quiet; this was for Dav, so it seemed right to let him decide. “Or should we make it six, just in case it takes longer to get out than we expect?”

Oh, he’d already decided he was willing to make it a shorter trip. Okay then. It was fine.

“They dyleda match won’t be until evening, so even if we come out that afternoon, we’ll be fine,” Jax offered.

Dav shook his head. “And exhausted. I’d bet that showing up late, dirty, or sleepy would be just as much of an insult as not showing up. We have to be out by the day before. I guess we can judge how long the return will be once we’re in. Uh, are there any dress requirements we should know about? I really don’t have any formal clothing.”

The answer turned out to be “technically no, but really yes.” It was a good thing the trip was still several weeks away; it gave them time to buy the right sort of clothes: a unified team outfit that somehow avoided looking like a uniform and also tied them together. It was probably the feathers.

Sophia’s base outfit was mostly quiet and understated, a simple light grey shirt and black pants. The only real adornment was the buttons, which were all in the shape of colorful feathers. When she put her cloak on, however, any chance of being called quiet or understated vanished. It looked like it was made of feathers that shimmered with light in all of the colors of her feathers and did a surprisingly good job of looking like her wings when they were summoned. It was definitely enchanted, both because Sophia could see the magic that danced across its surface and because she was pretty sure there was no way to make cloth look like her feathers without magic.

Dav’s outfit mirrored Sophia’s, though his cloak echoed the red and green flaming phoenix feathers of his first Arena fight. It even seemed to leak wisps of flame, even though the cloak itself was not unusually warm and could not set anything on fire; it was purely a visual effect.

Xin’ri and Ci’an had similar outfits, though Ci’an’s was a white shirt with brown trim and brown pants with a cloak in the same colors but with a barred pattern like her owl’s feathers. Xin’ri chose a divided skirt in black silk with a dark grey top and a cloak that looked like lightning dancing across purple feathers. Like Dav’s, lightning occasionally seemed to slip away from the cloak but never actually harmed anything nearby.

Jax was the outlier, with an outfit that was completely white except for dark blue sleeves and golden feather buttons. His cloak looked like it was made of feathers in the same deep blue as the sleeves with bright streaks that were definitely based on his usual “light-walking” method of flight. As he moved, his cloak left afterimages behind it, just like his steps did.

Now that Sophia thought about it, maybe it was really Ci’an that was the outlier. Her cloak simply looked like an owl’s wings; it was understated in a way that all of the others weren’t.

Xin’ri was not at all happy about the cost of the clothing; they had actual enchanted equipment that cost less, and the only enchantments on the clothing were the visual effects on the cloaks and a stain-repelling enchantment that helped the clothing stay pristine. 

Sophia wasn’t quite sure what the problem was. They needed the clothing to help Jax with his mission and they had the money. It was necessary, even though it was annoying. She knew better than to say that, though. People never reacted well to that question.

They left for the Maze two days after the clothes were ready, the morning after their last scheduled Arena fight before the dyleda competition. 

The marking system independent teams used just outside the Maze entrances was a lot more complicated than Arak Shade made it seem. That made a lot of sense to Sophia, since he didn’t actually use the system; even if he knew it, he probably didn’t think about it much. The actual system meant that entrances could be used multiple times, since the initial zone almost always led to a single link with multiple exits. Technically, the system could encode a long set of destinations, but it was almost never used for more than two links deep, and most people didn’t bother past the first link.

It took most of the morning to make their way far enough around the Maze that they could find an entrance gate that wasn’t marked as either in use or used up; it was marked that it had been used, but that there were branches available that hadn’t. That was enough. They didn’t need the easiest possible zone, the one at the entrance. They weren’t planning to stay shallow, though they’d likely try to get three or four zones deep and then “sideways” instead of going deeper, if they could figure out how.

If only they could navigate the Maze the way Arak Shade did. They knew it was possible, but they didn’t know how he did it.