Sophia checked Dav's hands and arms where he knelt over the rod he'd put into place. Hers were still scaled, but she thought she'd glimpsed something about his in the wash of mana and essence that poured out of the break right after he made it.

Yes, she had. Something glowed with pale blue light on the back of his left hand, the one he'd punched the false-rock seal. It almost looked like there was something on his hand, something made of essence turned to metal and light. It reminded her of an insect with far too many limbs, except that the head was completely missing, replaced with swirling light.

His fingernails seemed to glow with the same blue light, but it was darker on them. They seemed far longer than they should be and sharpened to a point. Sophia glanced to Dav's other hand and saw the same clawlike nails but no object on the back of his right hand. "Are you all right? Your hand…"

"It tingles a bit," Dav admitted as he moved to rub the back of his left hand with his right. As he did, he glowed softly, clearly reflexively using his healing Call. "It's strange; breaking the seal open hurt, but it was like a breath of fresh air came from the opening. It's gone now."

Fragments of mana seemed to break off the back of Dav's hand as Sophia watched. Was she looking at a piece of the false-rock seal that had attached itself to his hand? That seemed as likely as anything, but it was really odd. "Look at the back of your hand," she directed Dav.

Dav looked down and rubbed his hand again. By now, there was little more than a black streak with a slight bluish glow in front of it on the back of his hand. "Weird, but at least it's rubbing off. I think it must…" Dav trailed off and took a second look at his hands. "What happened to my fingernails?"

Sophia didn't have a good answer for her boyfriend, but there was a pair of nail clippers buried somewhere in her pack. She was pretty sure Dav had a set of his own as well by now. They'd been in the Broken Lands long enough to need them. "Uh, if you're fine maybe check your Status?"

Dav seemed to freeze in place for a moment as he pulled up his screen and checked it for changes. He let out a breath as he finished. "Nothing yet. Hopefully nothing ever. I'll clip them when we're out of here and hope it's nothing."

Sophia nodded slowly. For all that they were oddly pointed, they really did look more like colorful fingernails than like claws. It might be nothing more than an odd side effect of the fact that Dav temporarily plunged his hands into the magic of the Origin. The place was strange and responded easily to the thoughts of people who were in it. Having your fingernails grow out and look like they were painted was a pretty small change. If nothing was shown on his Status, it was probably nothing.

Sophia had her doubts about whether or not it would stay that way. She was pretty sure he'd mentioned something about a claws Species choice in the past that he'd skipped. Even if that did happen, though, it would be fine. Sophia's uncle Raz had claws; he was a draykin, and that meant claws. He kept his claws short and blunt since he didn't fight with them and it was generally easier to use human tools when he didn't destroy them.

One way or the other, it would be fine. She hoped that it would end the way Dav wanted, whatever that ended up being. She thought there was a very good chance of that. Unlike Taika, Dav was still mostly human because he wanted to be mostly human.

At least, she hoped that was how it worked for him. It seemed likely, but she couldn't exactly take Dav to someone who could check him out and see what was going on. There wasn't anyone like that in the Broken Lands.

That was a matter for the future, unfortunately, after they were back on Earth. "Are we done? Xin'ri, I think you said there was something more?"

"Yes, but it's simple. All you need to do is slowly pour some of the glue over the two ends so that it forms as good a bridge as you can manage. Issvako didn't specify which end to start at." Xin'ri sounded a little annoyed at the lack of detail.

Sophia figured there was enough. If that was all it said, that was all she needed to do. She carefully pulled the pitcher out of her pack and started pouring.

Sophia didn't think much was lost while it was in her pack; it seemed the same when she pulled it out as when she put it in. It still ran out before there was a good connection.

The glue thickened the end of the rod, but only a few threads descended all the way to the ground. She was going to have to open the vial they had, the one Xin'ri originally thought was more than enough. It seemed very inadequate now.

Sophia looked up at Dav. "Maybe it would be better to have you finish your connection before I reinforce this one?"

Dav shook his head. "Best to finish one side then bring it over here so you don't have to go back and forth. I don't want to go back and forth, and I can see the rock."

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Sophia turned towards Xin'ri for a verdict. Dav had some points, but at the same time she didn't want to run out of the glue before they got to Dav's side and she wasn't sure how much it would take. "Xin'ri?"

Xin'ri shook her head. "It needs to be a good connection, but there's a short window of time to make it good enough after there is one at all. It doesn't say how long that short window is."

Sophia nodded. "The pitcher helps preserve the glue, right? So I should pour the vial into the pitcher and not just use it directly?"

"I think so?" Xin'ri didn't sound at all certain.

It shouldn't hurt and it seemed like the thing to do. Sophia set the pitcher down and held the vial over the pitcher before she opened it and pulled the stopper out of the vial.

Black goo poured quickly out of the vial, almost like it was under pressure. Sophia's hand shook in surprise and sloshed a little bit of the glue on the outside of the pitcher before she got it back over the opening. More and more poured into the pitcher until at least four times as much had come out of the vial as it could possibly have held. At that point, the flow began to slow quickly.

Before long, Sophia held a vial that still looked black but that was likely translucent in good light above the pitcher. There was a little more glue clinging to the neck of the vial, so she shook the vial. It didn't budge. When she turned the vial upright again, some of the goo ever so slowly started to flow back down into the vial.

Sophia shook her head. She wasn't going to be able to get enough more out of the vial to be worth the effort, at least not unless they really ran out. She'd scrape the pitcher first; after the way this behaved, Sophia was willing to bet that there was a good bit of glue stuck to the inside of the pitcher.

She pushed the stopper into the vial and tucked it into her pack, then checked the level of the glue in the pitcher. It seemed lower than when she started gluing rods together but quite a bit higher than when she started trying to connect the rod to the floor. At least, she thought it was somewhere in between; with thick black glue in a pitcher that was black on the inside, it was hard to be sure. The poor light in the interspace didn't help.

Sophia carefully poured more of the glue over the connection. It came out slowly but smoothly, dripping from the end of the rod to the ground in a smooth wave. When it began to spread on the ground, she stopped pouring and watched. The goo seemed to withdraw a little from the end of the rod, so she added a little more. This time, she decided it was probably good enough.

She stood and tried to reach over the boulder with the pitcher. It didn't work; Dav was farther away than she thought he was. It was probably the same problem she'd had with the rod; space wasn't right in the interspace and she kept misjudging it.

Instead, she took the same path Dav had around the boulder, keeping as far away from where it probably was as possible. It was tougher than she thought, and she froze a couple of times when she lightly brushed against something a little more solid than she expected, but she made it without any real incident.

When Sophia arrived and turned to hand the pitcher to Dav, she found Xin'ri nearly all of the way through the damaged part of the wall as well. "Why didn't you stay on the other side?"

"I didn't want to be left alone," Xin'ri admitted. "The effect you mentioned, where distances don't seem right? I think I finally know what you meant. The moment you were behind the rock, you were suddenly a lot farther away from me than you were one step earlier. I wasn't sure I'd be able to catch up with you at all if I didn't go just then; I thought the entire place might move on me. It felt like it was going to."

Sophia blinked at Xin'ri, then glanced at Dav. That was one feeling she hadn't had here; sure, it changed every few steps but she never thought the corridor was going to move.

Dav frowned. "How is your Shield doing?"

Xin'ri looked startled, then quickly checked. "Above half, but not by much. It's gone down faster than the first time we were in here, but we should have time to finish and leave. Finishing won't take long."

Dav frowned at her, but he spoke silently to Sophia. "It shouldn't be that low. She checked when we got here and it was only down about fifteen percent. I'm guessing that dealing with the false-rock seal is hard on her shield. Mine's down a bit, but not too badly."

Sophia checked her own shield quickly. It had taken eleven points of damage, for whatever that meant. That was far more than she'd taken on past trips into the conduit, so it almost had to be from sticking her hands through the false-rock seal. It was a good thing she'd done what she could to reduce the damage, but her shield was still almost intact.

"Mine is fine," she stated out loud.

"As expected," Dav answered out loud. "That's why you were the primary, after all. Mine's taken some damage but it's not bad. Let me finish this off quickly so we can get out of here."

Dav suited his actions to his words and poured black goo over the connection point just like he had for connecting the rods. Also like connecting the rods, something happened that Sophia hadn't seen on the other side: the connective goo turned partially into glowing blue crystal.

Sophia wasn't sure if she blinked or not, but the next thing she knew, she wasn't standing in the half-broken corridor looking at the rod crossing the space that didn't actually hold a rock. Her surroundings were similar but completely different at the same time. The floor looked like dark glass crisscrossed continually by blue light. The walls were open except for pillars, showing an outside split between a rocky wasteland filled with fog and lightning strikes and a lightning-filled clear sky with crystals that floated on the lightning that topped the fog. The pillars supported a full ceiling with lights supplied by glowing crystals supported on a delicate-looking rock latticework. In the distance, an open door showed the way out.

The door was a lot closer than Sophia thought it should be. She also thought it was in the wrong direction, off to her right when it should have been off to her left. When she turned to look the other way, the corridor looked the same but it faded into the distance farther than she could see.

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