Sophia let Xin'ri think about her not-quite-offer as she sent the question telepathically to Ci'an and Taika. Taika's opinion was startlingly mercenary; he's approve Xin'ri if she came up with a better way for Dav to carry Taika. He was tired of hiding in backpacks or climbing to where he could barely see over Dav's shoulder while unsteadily clinging to the straps they'd added on the inside of his pouch so that he could climb up.

Ci'an laughed at Taika and said she wanted some time to think and a discussion with Xin'ri. She liked the idea but didn't think they needed to decide yet. With Dav already in favor and Cliff's preference to leave almost everything to Sophia, having Xin'ri join the team looked likely.

Sophia considered telling Xin'ri the good news, but it wasn't really that much of a surprise, was it? It would be better to wait until they were back upstairs and Xin'ri could talk to Ci'an and Taika in person instead of through Sophia.

It was time to glue the two larger pieces together anyway.

Now that they'd done it twice, Dav and Sophia knew what to do. The only real difficulty was that the two pieces they were joining were twice as long as the ones they'd glued together before. That made things a little awkward and Sophia definitely noticed that the rods weighed more than she expected, but it wasn't truly hard. The rest had helped.

The pitcher wasn't empty, so Sophia tucked it into her pack.

"How did that fit?" Xin'ri sounded puzzled. "Wouldn't it be better to carry it so the rest of the glue doesn't spill?"

Sophia shook her head. "I tucked it into one of the little cubbyholes for liquids. They're enchanted to keep things at the same orientation relative to gravity as when I put them in the cubbyhole. They'll sometimes slosh a little if things change too quickly, but even during a fight that's not much. While we're just walking, it won't move."

Xin'ri blinked at Sophia for a long moment. "You have an enchanted backpack. I mean, I knew it was enchanted, but special places to carry liquids where they won't spill?" Her voice rose in pitch a little with each word.

"Well, yeah, of course." Sophia didn't see what the problem was. "It makes things easier. I don't have that many of them, but they're still there and I haven't really been using them. I only have two that are big enough for the pitches, so I used the smaller one."

Dav started walking forward. He was careful as he stepped over the wires that crisscrossed the ground, but he still moved forward at a decent pace. Without thinking about it too much, Sophia started to follow.

Expressions flickered across Xin'ri's face too fast for Sophia to work out what they were. After a moment, Xinri seemed to put her thoughts into words. "Just how much can you store in your pack, and how?"

"Uh. Pretty well anything that can go through the opening will fit, technically, as long as it's a discrete item. The opening's enchanted to exclude things like the water from a river or air. There's a breathable atmosphere inside, but it's not from the outside; it's maintained by the bag's enchantments. That way, I don't have to worry that one thing will contaminate something else. It's not really easy to measure how much it'll hold, because it's sort of a conceptual storage." Sophia bit her lip and tried to think of how to explain that. There was a limit, but it was a soft limit.

Well, really, there were two limits, it was just that one of them was practical and the other was because of the magic. "It's made to store stuff but be easy to retrieve things. I think of what I'm looking for, reach in, and I should be able to grab it because whatever I'm thinking of will be at the full size and everything else won't be. The thing is, I can't do that if I don't remember it's there or even if I don't remember what it is well enough. That stuff just takes up space until I empty the whole bag. That's the practical limit."

Sophia examined Xin'ri. The other woman was listening but she seemed to have a frown on her face. She was either concentrating or what Sophia was saying was very strange to her. "The real limit, well, I've never hit it because the mana cost to keep the bag active goes up based on how much it's holding. It can store mana, but only so much and it gets really annoying because I have to charge it frequently if I'm carrying too much. There's also a cost for every time I add something or take it out, but I usually just pay that as I go. It's not very high."

Sophia didn't usually think about her pack's mana cost. It was pretty low, all things considered, but that was partly because she tried not to keep too much stuff in there. Books and papers and things like that were relatively cheap to keep in expanded space, too; it was enchanted items, especially ones that interacted with spacetime, that were really expensive. They weren't worth putting in the bag; the increased mana cost could get out of hand all too quickly that way.

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Sophia knew that from experience. She'd once had to clean up after she tucked a space-expanding purse (which fortunately only had some money and her stuffed puppy toy in it) into her mother's bag. Her mother was not at all happy about the mess and made Sophia clean it up to make her remember not to do that, at least not when both enchantments were active. It was fine if they weren't; the higher mana drain was because of the way it warped the expansion of space, or something like that. Sophia sort of understood the concepts, but she wasn't particularly good with spatial magic.

"Next you're going to tell me that your bag can freeze time, too." Xin'ri sounded stunned.

Sophia shook her head. "No, this backpack can't do that. I wanted a cubbyhole for that so I could keep snacks hot, but Mom said it wasn't worth it. The mana cost goes up too much and I was still Tier Zero then, I didn't have the mana for it and Mom didn't want to have to charge it for me all the time."

"Your mother bought it for you." Xin'ri sounded a little less shocked, now. "That makes some sense. Do you have any idea how much it cost?"

Sophia shook her head. "It was my school bag. I haven't priced a replacement yet because it's still in good shape. I do know that other people running Tier One and Two dungeons usually have bags smaller than mine. I end up carrying a lot of stuff for the group." That was why she always had her climbing kit, for starters. Other people could fit something like that, but they couldn't fit almost whatever they wanted the way Sophia could.

Xin'ri shook her head. "I'd like a chance to look over the enchantments this evening, if you're willing?"

"Sure," Sophia agreed. She could understand curiosity; goodness knew that if she saw a nifty spell she'd never seen before, she'd want to get a good look at it. She was basically doing that every time she saw something in a Challenge, after all, and it was fun. "Let me know if you need the pack empty or if you want stuff in it. I can show you how to charge it, too. Just don't damage it; I can't get a replacement here."

She wasn't certain if she could get a real replacement anywhere in the Broken Lands. She hadn't really looked, but she couldn't remember anything built like her pack in any of the enchanted item stores she'd been in, not that she'd been in many.

"I won't," Xin'ri agreed. "You're certain it's a variable space expansion and not a compression of each thing you bring in? And that there's an exclusion barrier at the interface?"

"That's how it was explained to me," Sophis admitted. "And wouldn't compressing items damage them over time? Stretching the space they occupy so that it's shaped differently doesn't do that." She paused, then admitted, "I don't know how stretching the space lets them get rid of the weight of the stuff in the bag, but it does. It gets heavier when I reach in to pull something out by the weight of whatever I'm taking out, but other than that it barely weighs more than when it's empty."

Xin'ri shook her head. She seemed to have no idea what to say to that.

They walked together in silence for the last few minutes it took to reach the area where the roof was still present and the "false-rock seal." It looked just like it had the previous time, and Sophia still did not see the boulder.

Strangely, Xin'ri did. Even more strangely, the boulder seemed translucent to Dav this time instead of fully solid, while it was fully solid to Xin'ri.

The process to bridge the gap was straightforward, at least. Sophia listened to Xin'ri's directions, then poked one end of the glued-together rod through the side of the false-rock boulder. She couldn't see it, but it was large enough that even minimal directions from Xin'ri and Dav were sufficient.

The next step was equally simple: she just had to bridge the entire gap with the rod, then set it on the ground. It was simple enough in concept, but they hadn't thought through all of the implications of using a method that was designed to be used soon after a break occurred on a false-rock seal that was very old and had had time to expand inside the solidified interspace.

The problem became obvious when the rod was three-quarters of the way into the rock. Sophia had to maneuver the rod from only one end and at that point, she was holding it very far from the center and she could barely use both hands because there wasn't much of the rod that wasn't in the rock, a rock she wasn't supposed to touch.

Worse, the boulder was bigger at the top than where it met the floor, and the rod was only big enough to have a couple of inches on either side at the floor. It would be completely within the false-rock if she tried to push it through higher.

They had to support the rod somehow and they didn't have any tools for it. Sophia stopped there as Xin'ri scoured her memory, but all Xin'ri could come up with was that there was supposed to be a "dangle" that was used for larger permanent repairs, but it wasn't in the small supply closet Othala showed Xin'ri. Xin'ri's guess was that Issvako brought it with her whenever she came to work on the conduit.

Xin'ri took a few minutes while Sophia held the rod inserted in the false-rock seal to test what happened when she stuck other materials into the sealed area. Every single one of the things she tested came back looking moth-eaten, partially dissolved, or simply missing. She couldn't build a "dangle" to lower the rod into place or even support the other side without information she didn't have. It was possible she could make an enchantment to counter the effect, but she simply didn't know enough to start. It would take time, likely months or years.

They didn't have that kind of time. While it was true that they weren't on a tight schedule, none of them were willing to accept that sort of delay, not even Xin'ri.

Not when they already had a solution, at least. Sophia was going to have to do what she had to do to control the rod and get it where it needed to be, even if it meant putting her hand into the false-rock seal. It might hurt, but Sophia had an idea about how to handle it better than she had the first time.

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