Sophia glanced around the room to see what the others were up to. Sweetfire was the easiest; he was at the map, sketching out the instructions it gave. He didn’t look happy, but that could easily be the fact that he was concentrating on getting everything copied down correctly.
The two large robots had clearly finished whatever they were doing in the circles they’d started in and were standing in different spots on the floor. One of the two was surrounded by yet another circle, one Sophia was pretty sure wasn’t there when they started, while the other was sketching more glowing runes on the floor. That was a puzzle Sophia didn’t think she’d be solving any ti soon, at least not unless she found an instruction manual sowhere.
Ci’an was sitting near the entrance playing with Taika. Sophia couldn’t imdiately tell what the rules of the ga were; it seed to be a guessing ga of so sort where Taika created illusions of different scenes, but Ci’an spent enough ti laughing that it could just as easily have been so form of interactive storytelling or even a cody of so sort.
Jax moved along the other displays, examining them for sothing. Sophia didn’t know what he was looking for; she suspected Jax didn’t either. He hadn’t said anything, at least not anything she’d noticed. No one else was paying particular attention to him, either, so she probably hadn’t missed anything important while she helped the flying drones.
Dav and Xin’ri both stood at one of the consoles, the one farthest from Sweetfire’s location. Xin’ri watched as Dav tapped the sa button repeatedly. He seed to be watching sothing on the console, rather than the screens to his side; Xin’ri was the one watching the screens.
The ga with Taika looked interesting; he ca up with so great ideas for gas. He’d even managed to not run out of ga ideas during the months of winter. Everyone else had; they weren’t used to being stuck inside the whole ti with more ti than they knew what to do with.
Sophia shook her head and headed for Dav; she could play with Taika later. “Find sothing interesting?”
“Yeah.” Dav’s voice was clipped, precise. He only spoke like that when he was stressed, which told Sophia more than the word did. “This wasn’t intended as a food production facility.”
Sophia wasn’t certain if she was surprised by that or not. She felt like she should be, but at the sa ti it seed right. This was part of Tiwaz’s facility; they had to have food, but it made all too much sense that the greenhouses wouldn’t survive. It didn’t survive in Othala’s facility, after all. This had been abandoned for nearly as long, yet it was still functional. That ant it had more redundancy and a level of automated repair that Othala’s simply didn’t have. “What was it?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” Dav glanced up at Sophia, then waved towards the console he was using. “I’m pretty sure it’s a mashup of several different things. Everything’s marked in Kestii, but I can see where so of it was put over other lettering, and a few of the words are even still in place. They aren’t perfect translations, either, or at least the translation I’m getting isn’t quite the sa.”
“Do you think they bought it, like the interspace conduits?” Sophia wasn’t going to forget those any ti soon. Not only were they a way to reach part of the chaos of the Origin, even if it was a very constrained part of it, they were installed by an Archon. Archons were long extinct in her ho universe, at least as far as she knew.
Their descendants were still around, though they were very rare. Sophia was certain of that; after all, she was one of those descendants.
“Parts of it,” Dav half-agreed. “I think they sourced it from several places, then put it together themselves. In so ways, that’s a good thing; there are notes all over the place about what they thought the different pieces do. It’s probably also why it’s still working; there are at least four different repair systems here, and they’re all loaded with the others’ schematics. It looks like there’s supposed to be a central coordinator, but it’s been operating in autonomous mode. That’s what I’d call it, at least; they don’t seem to have set it up formally, it’s just backups working with backups. It’s also pretty clear that whatever was here before the disaster, so people survived; I haven’t found the specific logs yet, but the plant distribution is very different on either side of that dividing line.”
Sophia could already guess who the “central coordinator” was supposed to be. That was Tiwaz’s exact job. The real mystery was why he was offline if there were still people around; if she rembered correctly, he said he went to sleep after the evacuation.
Wait, that did make sense. Sophia didn’t rember the details, but she did rember that there was so ti between the breaking of the Tower of Kestii and when people left, ti where the area beca even more dangerous than it had been before. It seed entirely likely that the Garden changed from its original purpose to food production in that ti.
“Stop, go back one,” Xin’ri told Dav. “I saw sothing familiar.”
Sophia looked up at the display as Dav reversed his direction. She didn’t know what command he entered, but it was clear he did; Xin’ri nodded with satisfaction. It took Sophia a mont to see what Xin’ri had noticed, but when she did it was blatantly obvious. “That’s a fireflower.”
The different stages of a fireflower’s life filled the top screen, along with a diagram of the plant itself. The bottom screen was far more interesting; it showed how to make a fireflower without one to start with. At least, that was what Sophia thought it showed; the diagram was clearly simplified with what were probably the local version of hyperlinks to the details, but it was fairly clear that there were three major components: an insubstantial spirit of so sort, large quantities of fire mana, and the flower.
Dav tapped sothing and the screen dissolved into text. It took a while to figure out what it was talking about, but between the three of them they were able to decipher that this was the 4,372nd attempt to rge fire mana with a plant and the 137th success.
“You can all read Kestii?” Sweetfire sounded surprised when he joined them on their side of the room.
“Translation Ability,” Dav answered absently. “It’s not usually very useful, but right now it certainly is.”
“Those are pretty rare, even for Professionals,” Sweetfire sounded slightly envious. “I had to learn the language to read the Garden entries. How did all three of you get one?”
Dav shook his head. “We didn’t; it’s Sophia’s. I have an Ability that lets
share languages, though, which effectively ans we know the languages she does, including the ones from the translation Ability.”
“You’re a psychic?” Sweetfire sounded shocked. “I had you pegged as a bruiser! No wonder you can do that odd shapeshift; it really is more like a psychic’s than a bruiser’s. Does your Core support your physicality with Abilities? That’s an unusual build for a psychic, but clearly it’s working for you.”
Sophia blinked at the man, then covered her eyes with her hand. There was clearly more than one reason Sweetfire was so interested in their group; the man sounded like a complete Arena nerd.
“I’d rather not say,” Dav pushed back gently. “At least not in detail. I will say that my Abilities aren’t entirely psychic; I’d call them magical.”
Sophia chuckled. It was a distinction without a difference, as far as she was concerned; psychic abilities were simply magic by another na. They were usually more directly used; a “psychic” telepath might simply speak in others’ minds where a mage with a telepathy spell would have to cast the spell first, but that didn’t make the psychic any less magical. It simply ant they had a Talent.
Not that the Guide recognized Talents, at least not as far as Sophia could tell. She didn’t really have any, other than her unusually strong aura, but that was normal for her family. She couldn’t really call it a Talent.
“Not a bruiser, either way.” Sweetfire tapped the console while he thought. “I wonder if we can use that? Built it up so that you look like you’re just a strong arm, then have you do sothing really flashy and obviously not sothing you should be able to do? If we set it up so that it looks like you were reserving the Ability for a desperate situation, it’ll be really exciting. I love reveals like that.”
“We’re sort of already doing that,” Xin’ri interrupted Sweetfire’s verbal daydream. “And we’re kind of in the middle of sothing. Can we concentrate on the fact that the ancients made monsters?”
“I’m not sure they did,” Sophia disagreed. She wasn’t entirely certain if she was right or not, but there was more than one reason to experint with mana, and the fireflowers were possibly the least monstrous of the enemies they’d fought over the years. They also pulled mana out of the ground, specifically fire-based mana. The Guide wouldn’t have been able to open a Fire Mana Fissure if there wasn’t a lot of it there. The question was whether they were making things better or worse … and Sophia wasn’t even sure which way was better.
“I think they were trying to make plants that did sothing they wanted. That might be the fireflowers themselves; we were able to sell them because they’re useful. It could also be because the fireflowers do sothing they wanted. They turned that Hollow into a good place for them to grow, didn’t they? What would have been there if the fireflowers weren’t there? Did they pull all the fire there or were they just processing what was already there?” Sophia wasn’t sure if she was imagining things or not, but Challenges always felt a lot like dungeons, and one of the major purposes of dungeons back ho was to cleanse mana, stripping it of the remnants of what it was used for and returning it to the normal mana cycle. Challenges here didn’t seem to do that, but what if that was what the ancients were trying to fix?
Sophia tried to reign herself in. She was jumping so far ahead it wasn’t even funny. It was easily just as possible that they were trying to use the fireflowers to split up natural mana and make it weaker. They could even have been trying to weaken the Maze.
Actually, now that she thought about it, that would make a lot of sense with their current location. She definitely couldn’t discount that, but she also couldn’t ignore the possibility that they were near the Maze because it was the highest magic area in the ancient Kestii Empire; they probably couldn’t do the experints anywhere else.
“There are a lot of other entries in this section,” Dav said as he tapped a few more buttons. “All of them are plants, and the filtering system is complete garbage. There’s no way to tell if it was a success or not without reading through the report. There has to be a better way to do this.”
If there was a better way, they didn’t find it that day. The only thing any of them could think of was that indexing was probably handled by Tiwaz, and the Garden seed not to connect to the facility-mind anymore.
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