It was a long walk to Mazehold, just like it had been a long walk to the fireflower Hollow. Sophia would have preferred to ride, but getting the horses down multiple flights of stairs, through the interspace conduit, and then back up still more stairs wasn't realistic. They probably wouldn't survive the conduit, even if the rest could be managed - and it wouldn't have been easy.

The walk was made even longer by the fact that Dav seemed to be hurt. He'd pause in the middle of a step, take a deep breath, then move on. Whenever Sophia asked, he said he was fine, but she didn't believe him.

The third time he stopped abruptly, Sophia changed her question. "Why don't you call your healing beacon, or whatever it's called now?"

"Overflowing Health Call," Dav corrected her, then seemed to droop a little. "I tried. It made the burn even worse, so I let it go."

"Give it a few hours," Jax suggested. "After we get to the Registry and have rooms, you can test it again. Until then, well."

Jax shook his head slightly. Sophia couldn't quite tell if it was a smile or a grimace that flittered across his face; perhaps it was both. "Let me tell you about how I pulled my Grand Talent together. You're a bit early, since most of you are barely past the second upgrade, but it's never too early to start. I had several false starts and even had to sunder a Grand Ability that was close but not right; it would have allowed me to slowly alter my Abilities by merging with my Mask, but it didn't let me completely Mask myself."

"Just what is your Grand Talent?" Xin'ri interrupted with a question that Sophia wished she'd thought to ask. "Your Signature is your Mask, and you keep talking like it's your Grand Talent."

Jax chuckled. "A Grand Talent that will let you move to the third upgrade uses your Signature. It's possible to merge them as you Upgrade, I've heard of that, but that wasn't how I did it. I built my Grand Talent around my Mask. Without my Grand Talent, I could create another identity, a Mask, that made myself and my Abilities look different but didn't actually change anything. With my Grand Talent, I have much more capability to shift both what I look like and what I can do. I could look like that flaming lizard-man Dav became and have an entire suite of flame-based Abilities that actually burn my enemies, rather than light-based Abilities that revolve around making illusions solid."

Sophia glanced at Taika, or more accurately at the spot in Dav's backpack where Taika slept, when Jax said that. He'd described Taika's basic Abilities pretty well, but they'd gone in completely different directions from the same starting point. Taika could do huge involved illusions, even if they were only visual. He'd mentioned that he had the option to choose things that affected the mind as well, and he'd picked a few up, but he had no way to connect to others' minds. He intended to use them entirely defensively. He was leaning into the idea of protecting his allies through Dav's psychic mesh with only limited ability to affect the outside world. His light-barriers were fairly strong, but they were still the only thing he could really do in a fight other than fool enemies.

Not that fooling enemies was useless; far from it. Sophia still remembered how surprisingly easy the fight against the Hungering Spark was when it didn't know where they were.

It was very different from the direction Jax went with his Abilities; he focused them on himself instead of the area around him. "Can you imitate a specific person?"

Jax smiled, but there was no humor in that smile at all. "Yes. I can use a Mask to completely imitate the appearance, physical and mana capacity, and Abilities of anyone at the second upgrade as long as I have enough time to study them and learn their capabilities. I can't fully imitate another's Grand Talent, but I can often fake it if I'm careful. My Mask also doesn't include their training, personality, or other knowledge; I have to manage that myself. Most of the time, I only have to get close enough; people don't really look that deeply. I prefer to create my own persona to avoid the limits if I'm doing something that will take time, but I've replaced people in the past."

Sophia frowned thoughtfully. That was a heck of an ability, definitely, but the things it wouldn't let you do were at least as numerous as the ones that it did let you do. It would be a hell of a tool for infiltration, though; you'd want a way to figure out that people weren't who they appeared to be before they did anything they shouldn't. "Wait a minute. That's why Othala and Tiwaz used our mana imprints to know who we are, isn't it? Can you fake that?"

"Not even a little bit," Jax admitted. "There are accounts of people who can, but forging a mana imprint is a Grand Talent of its own. If I had to fool Othala or Tiwaz, I'd need the help of someone who could lay a false mana signature over my own, and I'm not certain there is anyone who can do that alive today. Even if there was, I don't know if it would fool them; Tiwaz said the false mana imprints Kizru Venan and Thera Sandelf had were good enough to work as long as no one actually looked at them. That may be as good as it gets, now, at least."

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"Where do you think they got their false imprints?" Xin'ri barely waited for Jax to stop before she questioned him. "I've picked up a few things over the years that no one can use; do you think they'd be able to use them?"

Jax shrugged. "Maybe? I hadn't really thought about it, but there must be someone in the Arena who can create a false imprint. That's probably how they work the entire Arena setup; the healing's the most obvious thing but it's not the only old enchantment they use."

"It could be a lot more common than you think," Sophia added. "The guy who collapsed the stairs over Othala had a hollow imprint, too. Unless he came here to get it, there have to be more people who can do that."

"He could have," Jax answered. "You said he was second upgrade, didn't you? A lot of second upgrade people come to the Maze. Most leave without ever reaching the third."

"He said he'd been here," Dav added. There was pain in his voice, but it was clear he wasn't going to admit it if he didn't have to. "In his notebook. Remember, he compared the complex Othala was in to one near Mazehold?"

Sophia had to think back to that notebook. She hadn't really thought about it in a while. "You're right, aren't you. Figures. Okay, maybe it's not that common."

"I wonder if whoever gave them their imprints knows how to find out what's needed," Xin'ri mused. "Not to mention how to make something that requires a specific imprint. I know how to bind an item to a specific person, but that requires attunement. An item that could read an imprint and then work or not based on whether that is there would be a lot more flexible, but that requires a way to give people imprints."

Sophia looked down. Xin'ri sounded absolutely excited over the idea that she could whitelist people so that they could use an enchanted item. It wasn't a new idea to Sophia; it was used back home. She couldn't do it, but she knew it existed. She didn't think it was done by adding something to the person, but how would she know?

Well, she did know a couple of ways to do it for wards. She also knew how to bypass them. She wasn't entirely certain if that was the lessons her father meant for her to get from using wards to keep her away from her weapons until she got her actual schoolwork done, but she wouldn't put it past him. He wasn't normally sneaky, but she'd wondered for years if he thought of that as part of her schoolwork; he certainly never seemed particularly upset when she got through them. The wards were more difficult the next time, that was all.

Sophia looked up at Xin'ri. "Um, do you have any of them with you? I don't know enchantments, but I do know how to bypass some wards, and those are sort of like specialized enchantments. I can take a look. At the least, I'm pretty sure I won't break anything."

"Sure." Xin'ri held out her hand. Sometime between when she spoke and when the hand reached Sophia, it held something that looked more like a single die than anything else. It had six sides, rounded corners, and a different large symbol on each side with smaller marks around it. All of the carved lines glowed a soft blue. It was about the size of a die, too, roughly half an inch long on each side.

"This is supposed to be able to record and project voices and other sounds, with a delay or repeated, or … a number of other options. It's not ancient, like what we found in Othala's ruins; it's only about thirty years old. The problem is that the person who made it is the only person who could set it up for someone else, and she died six years ago. I've been carrying it around ever since, trying to figure out what she did." Xin'ri rolled it forward along her palm until it rested on two fingers, then flipped her hand and held the die out to Sophia. "I'm sure you can figure out a lot of ways it can be useful; I won it off someone who liked to play tricks with it. Decent warrior, terrible card player, even worse trickster. If you can fix it, we can use it. If you can't, no big loss."

"You know, that might just be the in we need," Jax mused. "I thought we'd start by fighting in the Arena, since that's how most people start, but if we can make contact with the people who actually make the Arena work … that would be valuable. I certainly didn't learn what I needed by working directly for the Broken Blade. Maybe that's because she didn't have the answer."

Sophia doubted that. "More likely she didn't trust you. From what you've said, you expected her to try to kill you; why would she share secrets with you?"

Jax took a deep breath, then let it out in a sigh. "Fair. Getting the information was the reason I took a risky position like that, but learning where to try next works too. I thought the Broken Blade's assistant would be the person who handled all the interactions with the people who went into the Maze. Supposedly, I did, but people like Kizru led the teams she actually cared about. She always talked to them without me there."

Sophia wasn't sure what to say to that, so she looked down at the voice recorder instead. It was very clearly enchanted. Just as clearly, she could see that the sigil at the center of each face was a mana input; it looked like they were all designed as simple buttons, rather than anything more complex. There wasn't anywhere to put in a key, but one of the sides was different from the others. The mana near the input had an odd spiral shape that wasn't replicated in the visible symbol. It was a place to start.

Sophia grinned to herself, absorbed in the puzzle. When Dav took her free hand with his, she squeezed his hand comfortingly but didn't look up, even when he chuckled. He didn't let go; instead, they walked down the old abandoned road comfortably hand in hand.

Sophia didn't pay much attention to the warm feeling of happiness his hand gave her. He accepted who she was and was happy to be with her anyway. That was what she wanted, and it seemed to be what he wanted, too.

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