"So let me see if I have this right. You're working for the Broken Blade, who is both the leader of the followers of the Broken Lord and the Master of the Arena. You're not actually loyal to her, however, because you're really an agent of Mazehold's Vocational Registry looking for secrets there because the Arena's staff survive the Maze better than anyone else who enters." Sophia gave Jax a disbelieving look. "Why did you tell us all that? You want something from us, don't you?"

Jax leaned back in his seat. "I do. I need your help. What I'm doing isn't working. This is the closest we've ever gotten anyone to the Broken Lord, but it's still the wrong place. I've been sent to discover things about the Maze, but all I'm finding out about is the Arena, and I don't have much longer in this position. The Broken Blade doesn't keep her adjutants very long; they tend to disappear. I suspect I don't have much longer, which makes this a great time to change Masks."

"I saw you put on a mask that vanished, then you stopped looking like you were made of yellow light. Is that what you mean?" Sophia had actually seen a little more than that; the mask looked like it vanished, but it didn't. Instead, the mana that was infused in the mask seemed to stretch as Jax held it to his face and now covered his body. Sophia was pretty sure that if she hadn't seen him use the mask, it would be impossible to pick out from his normal aura.

Jax nodded. "Yeah. Masks are my Signature, just like feathers, er, plumes are yours. They're also tied into my Grand Talent. I can create a Mask with its own Abilities and appearance; I can even mask the Anchor and Signature. Jaxucet Willowbloom is my current Mask; his Anchor is his body and his Signature is metal. His Abilities allow him to create things made of metal and manipulate them if they are close enough to him. That's all he can do, but it's enough to look like a second-upgrade Vocation, at least a simple one."

Sophia had a dozen different questions about Jax's Mask ability swim to the surface of her mind. Did that mean he could quickly swap Ability sets? Did they all have to be that limited? Could he make up whatever he wanted the Abilities to be or did they have to tie to something he could otherwise already do? How quickly could he change Masks? Was there a limit to how many he could have available at once? Could he wear one Mask on top of another or did he always have to go through his true form?

Were his Masks always the same power or could he make one that was a lot weaker or stronger? Was "Jaxucet Willowbloom" as powerful as it was possible for him to make a Mask? Was there a reason that Mask didn't have a Grand Talent when Jax did have one? For that matter, if he had a Grant Talent, was he third upgrade or was his Grand Talent like her Grand Ability and Grand Spell? For that matter, how did that work? Why was a Grand Talent required to reach the third upgrade?

Sophia pushed all of those questions to the side. She definitely wanted to ask them later, but there was another question that came ahead of all of them. "If you take on a new Mask, a new identity, what will it be? I assume there's something you want us to do or you wouldn't be bringing it up."

Jax glanced down, then back up. "I need a group I can trust to take on the Maze, and you've already shown that you're willing to fight the Arena staff and followers of the Broken Lord. That's harder to find than you'd think. You've said you're not ready to face the Maze, but also that you want to. I can help you get there, if you will help me look into the Arena. I may also need to ask you another favor."

Jax took a deep breath. "How did you disable the sanctions? That has to be your doing, it's the only thing that makes sense."

It took a good bit of back-and-forth before they understood that when Jax said "sanctions," he meant "contingent healing that is good enough to potentially revive someone who was recently killed." The term came from people being sanctioned to access the healing, rather than from the fact that it was healing. It only worked in the Arena building and required some sort of registration, which the Arena staff used to limit it to people they wanted to have access to the healing who also paid for it in magic items that were then added to a "destruction box" that seemed to be a smaller version of the creation chamber near the top of the ruins.

Once that was settled, it quickly became clear that the problem was simple: like the "destruction box," the creation chamber could also be used to deconstruct things into mana, as long as it was sufficiently mana-rich. Essentially, it was being used to make and then consume boxes like batteries.

Removing the mana-filled boxes meant there was no power for the healing system. The fact that Sophia had used many of the boxes to create the monsters they'd fought didn't really matter; there were still a lot left. The fact that they weren't in the creation chamber where they could be turned back into mana to fuel the healing was far more important.

From Jax's description of the process, Tiwaz was able to figure out what was going on. People who donated items were tagged twice, once to keep track of the "value" they'd submitted and once as a true registration that meant the enchantments on the upper level kept track of their condition. There was more than one way to set up the healing, with adjustments for when to initiate healing and the maximum amount that could be healed; locations where the healing was valid could also be added. Even though the payment was supposedly tied to several of the settings, that wasn't actually done by the enchantment. It had to be manually set for each person and changed each time the person was healed or "donated" more.

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No matter what level they were set to, the enchantment kept an updated log of the "pristine" physical and magical state of each registered person's body and manaform in the distal recording node. It would then restore them to that state if the conditions for healing were met.

It was an enchantment that Tiwaz recognized but not one that was supposed to be connected to the distal recording node. Instead, it was an experimental device designed by one of the enchanters Othala supported that was supposed to be used on expeditions to the Maze. It happened to still be in Tiwaz's halls when the Tower was broken.

Tiwaz couldn't say for certain what happened after that, but it was clear to everyone that in the years after the fall of the Tower, someone jury-rigged a setup to use the device. It was probably originally used in an attempt to live in the complex, but that was clearly abandoned at some point.

Hundreds of years later, the followers of the Broken Lord found it and someone had the bright idea to set up a gladiatorial arena where people could pay to not die … or perhaps where some people could pay to not die. It was well known now, but Jax thought it was a more recent discovery than Tiwaz's records indicated. Keeping something like that secret would be useful but difficult, so it kind of made sense that it would be known a hundred years after it was found.

After all that, Sophia expected that Jax's request would be to either restore the sanctions or permanently keep them from being restored. Neither was correct, at least not completely.

He wanted them to cover for his "death."

That meant they needed to repeat what they'd done against his group when the next group that came down from above, making the challenge hard enough that it was believable that his group was entirely wiped out but not entirely destroying the following group. His guess was that the next group would be stronger, which would make it easy enough to let some or all live, injured. At the minimum, the Broken Blade was unlikely to have more than half of the open combatants injured in some way.

Jax waved at the bandage on his left arm, then paused. "Why doesn't it hurt? UnMasking doesn't remove injuries … is one of you a healer? A real healer, one that can heal the body and not repair Shield, without touching me?"

"That would be me," Dav answered with a smile. "I'm not sure I can call myself a real healer when all I can do is mend injuries; it helps but I can't do anything about things like poison. I also can't help shields recover, though I've been thinking about looking for something that can do that. It'll probably be separate if I figure it out."

Sophia blinked at Jax. Had he completely missed the fact that Dav glowed with green light ever since they finished the fight? Was that normal enough in his world that it didn't mean anything?

"Are you still injured?" Dav continued. "None of us were hurt, so I can let the Call go if you're fully healed."

"You have a reliable multi-person heal that doesn't require you to direct the healing?" Jax shook his head. "You have no idea how rare that is, do you? We don't have anyone with that sort of Ability in Mazehold and I'm pretty sure there isn't one at the Arena either. How strong is it? That wasn't a particularly bad injury, even if it did make using my arm difficult."

Dav shrugged. "As long as it's an injury, we haven't found anything I can't heal with a bit of time. It doesn't work on some things at all, but it works well on every injury we've tried. The downside is that it's really not useful during a fight; it's just too slow. I can only help with post-battle recovery."

There was a ghost of a smile on Jax's face as he shook his head. "The more I hear about your group, the more I want to help you get ready for the Maze. You're atypical but that just makes you interesting and clearly what you're doing works. As for whether or not it's healed, let's look."

It took a couple of minutes for Jax to remove the bandages and check the wound to determine that he was in fact fully healed. He rubbed his formerly-injured arm and sighed. "Thank you for the healing. I don't think whatever group is sent next will be so divided; the Broken Blade won't want to lose more people. So … maybe you should add an obvious fault they can fix and let the sanctions start working again? It will keep them from exploring deeper."

"I would rather continue killing the ones with the hollow imprints," Tiwaz answered immediately. "They are not authorized to use any of my facilities and have done so under false pretenses. If I could, I would hand them over to the Justiciars."

Sophia remembered that that was almost exactly Othala's opinion of the Templar that used a hollow imprint to collapse her tunnel, as well. It seemed like the two facility-minds were aligned in that, if nothing else.

"It's a ruse," Jax answered easily. "It only has to last long enough for us to infiltrate the Arena without suspicion. Actually, hmm." A sinister smile spread across Jax's face. "How would you feel about letting them fix it, then making it break in a different location a few days later? Can you make it look like the sanction enchantment is failing?"

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