Tiwaz took its time thinking about that, but when it finally did answer, it sounded intrigued. "If I set it up so that they don't know when it's going to fail, perhaps even set it up so that it fails during an unusually large mana draw … maybe I can get behind that. Unreliability can be worse than a known lack, after all, so I'm not really helping the impostors."

Sophia tried not to smile as Tiwaz justified what it wanted to do to itself. It wasn't wrong, but there was one thing she should remind them of. "If I'm going to summon more monsters, I'm going to need a lot more of those mana cubes. There are still a lot left, but probably only enough to do the same number of monsters two or three times."

"Then we need to make the breaks early, so that you don't need so many. That would also let you set it up ahead of time. The first failure may have to be deep, but the others shouldn't be." Xin'ri turned to Jax. "How much do you know about the setup down here? What are we working against?"

"I don't know much, but Thera had a map. We were checking all of the conduits on the way down, so maybe damage to one of them would be a good enough reason?" Jax shook his head. "I know Thera and Sorleh did something at each of the conduits to make sure they were working after Kizru opened each door, but I don't actually know what they did. Thera said something about the conduits being empty before we headed to the recording node, but that's all I remember."

"The conduits don't hold mana," Tiwaz objected. "They carry it, from the collection webs scattered throughout the complex to the various enchantments that use it but they don't hold it. That's why whoever set this up used the creation chamber to create containers. There is a limited amount of mana storage in a room near here, but most of it is used as it is collected; the additional storage is intended for regulation and high-usage events. It would handle one of the healings you talked about, but it would take a long time to recover to a high enough level to function."

Tiwaz paused for a moment, then chuckled. "Which means it's a little more complicated than we thought. After we pulled the storage containers out of the creation room, someone was healed. That left the other storage low and it couldn't refill from the creation chamber the way it was supposed to, so when it had to heal again, it couldn't. When the two hollow ones tried to pull mana out through the collection web, they should have gotten a low mana flow but not enough to heal anyone. That is why it was empty."

Sophia nodded along with the facility-mind's description. It made sense, more or less; the stuff in the creation chamber was slow batteries while the ones actually connected to the main system were faster and most of the time everything ran on the equivalent of grid power anyway. It was just that the grid was actually mana collection points hidden in the walls to absorb the mana emitted by the nexus, sort of like solar cells collecting light.

At least, she hoped that was what Tiwaz meant.

"So, we need to set up something to make it look like your group was killed on the way down. Do we have to set everything up again? Can't we just … leave some sort of evidence that you had to fight your way down and then have a monster or two that you …" Sophia coughed to make it obvious that she was establishing the cover story, "Didn't kill, that killed you instead? We can put the bodies there too, though I don't know where we'll get a body for you."

Her plan would be a lot less mana intensive than the original idea of making them repeat the earlier descent. She might even be able to do it entirely using her own mana if she could limit it to a couple of the fights; that wasn't very many monsters. "I could also slowly add new monsters, like they were respawning … no, wait, they only last so long, don't they? That's part of why I had to summon them as you got close. I guess we could fake that by making it tougher if it's been longer since the last time people came down."

"That should work," Jax agreed. "I'd rather take care of this soon, too; if I'm going to get the group of you ready for the Maze, we can't be tied to the ruins. I know where a few Hollows are that aren't cleared very often; they're allowed to stay in place because we don't want anything stronger moving in. They'll be a good source of Wisps, if you can manage them. After that, we'll work on Signatures for those of you that don't have them and then we can start looking at the Maze's outskirts; that's also when you should visit the Arena for the first time."

"We don't really need the Wisps," Ci'an informed him. "Xin'ri will need some, but she's already second upgrade. I don't know if we'll need any to reach the third upgrade or not, we have a lot of Wisps."

"We ran into some problems in the Skylands," Dav spoke up. "Izel was attacked, there was a monster that chased us as we left … and then there's everything we ran into in the ruins where we found the connection that led here. We have a bunch of Wisps, but we also have a bunch of Abilities, and new ones are pretty expensive. I'm not sure how much we can afford, if we need to bring everything up to the top of first upgrade. It ought to be enough to get us into the second upgrade, though."

Stolen story; please report.

Silently, Dav continued across the mindlink. "Don't tell him where the Wisps actually came from. I don't know how he feels about the Broken Lord or the Templars, and a secret only stays secret if it's not shared. I'm willing to work with him; help in the Maze should be huge and so far he hasn't asked anything unreasonable. That doesn't mean I'm willing to trust him."

"Works for me," Ci'an answered silently. "Lan'ti is going to be so envious if I get into the Maze before he does! This should be fun."

Sophia blinked. She hadn't even quite realized it as they were swept up in Jax's plans, but they'd never actually decided if they were going to agree or not, had they? They'd just started planning how to accomplish his goals.

"Ah, one moment," Sophia said out loud. "We should settle one thing first. We're all good with Jax's trade, right? We all help him look into the Arena and what they're doing to survive more easily in the Maze and he helps us get ready for the Maze as much as he can. We can figure out the how if we're all good with the what." She looked towards Xin'ri, since she was the only one who hadn't said anything silently. Sophia already knew Cliff was good with it, and Taika seemed equally uncaring as long as he had interesting things to do and time to nap. They'd ask when he woke, but Sophia was already certain what his answer would be.

"We can leave if it doesn't work," Xin'ri answered. "I think it sounds like a good trade for all of us. It's certainly a good place to start."

Dav and Ci'an both gave their agreement. In a surprise to Sophia, so did Tiwaz.

That was the start of the real planning session. It required opening up a bit more about their Ability sets than they'd done before, even to the Registry staff, but there really wasn't a way around it.

To avoid the issues they'd had the previous time they completed an upgrade, Jax set Dav, Sophia, Amy, and Taika on a fairly strict limit: they were to spend no less than two hundred and no more than four hundred Wisps a day. It didn't sound strict, but it meant they had to plan out everything after the first few days.

He also asked them to limit their purchases of new Abilities. Picking something up because it seemed useful or fun was forbidden unless they talked through it with him first; the only things he wanted them to buy were things that filled in a gap in the group's capabilities or directly influenced the direction of their Anchor, Signature, and Grand Talent.

That meant he had to explain what the three things meant.

An Anchor was where any Ability started. The most common anchor was Body, which both Jax and Ci'an shared. Xin'ri's was Item, which meant that her magic had to flow through something in order to work; it was apparently the most common Anchor for mages, which surprised Sophia almost as much as Sophia's Domain Anchor surprised Jax. He'd heard of the Anchor before, but it was very unusual. If she chose the correct Signature or Grand Talent, she'd be able to form a Domain around herself that empowered her and her allies and weakened her enemies.

Sophia's mind flashed back to the Hungering Spark. Its doman was a weaker form of that; it seemed to be necessary for the Hungering Spark's survival, but it also allowed the Hungering Spark to move quickly within the zone it controlled.

Taika's Avatar Anchor and Dav's Entity Anchor confused Jax; he hadn't heard of either of them. They seemed functionally identical to a Body Anchor, so all they could do was keep in mind that it might be slightly different. Sophia and Dav were fairly certain that Taika's, at least, was extremely similar to Body; while they didn't mention it to the others, Taika was probably as much a permanent summoned creature of Cliff's as anything else.

Knowing that didn't help figure out why Dav's was Entity instead of Body.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, a Signature was a theme all Abilities had to share once you gained the Signature. It explained why so many of Sophia's changed with her first upgrade when she gained the Signature. Anything that didn't match the Signature would be dropped; that was one of the reasons Jax didn't recommend going too broad on Abilities. He was amazed her new Sphere let her keep as many as it did.

Sophia was certain that was because the Wanderer curated the Sphere before he offered it to her. It wasn't something she wanted to mention, though she was certain Dav, Ci'an, and Taika all knew.

Jax said a Grand Talent was when you made a Sphere your own. It was another point where Abilities were reorganized or lost; the only ones you could keep that weren't tied to your Grand Talent were Species Abilities, and some of those could be lost as well. Once you had a Grand Talent, you had to create all of the Abilities yourself, though learning them from Challenges did still work sometimes.

Grand Abilities and Grand Spells were not well known outside Mazehold. They were effectively a smaller, simpler version of taking a supplementary Sphere, so most of the time that was the recommendation if your Sphere took you in a direction you didn't want. Grand Abilities and Grand Spells were simply not important to anyone who wasn't headed for the third upgrade, since they were difficult to achieve and not actually necessary until it was time to form your Grand Talent. At that point, you had to merge all of your Called Spheres and Grand Abilities and Grand Spells into one Grand Talent that became your new Sphere.

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