"If you're all done…?" The foxkin man trailed off and glanced around the group. "I have an offer for you. As I'm sure you all know, there's been a little problem with second upgrade skyeagles lately."

"Yeah?" Ci'an sounded puzzled. "So?"

"So we usually don't schedule aerial enemies for a new team, but if you can all fly … it would be quite a debut," he suggested. "I have an opening for an aerial combat three days from now; I can put you down against skyeagles if you're willing to take them on."

"I don't really fly so much as float really well," Dav admitted. "And Jaycen…"

"Don't worry about Jaycen or me," Xin'ri reassured Dav. "I think we can make it work. The real question is … which is more important, an efficient fight or a spectacular one? I have some ideas for either one, but we can't do both. We can probably kill a good number of skyeagles if we go after them seriously, but that might not be as good a show."

"Spectacular," the foxkin that Sophia was beginning to think might be more than just a scheduler said firmly. "No one will be able to tell how far you are in the upgrade from the stands, and you're not going to out-kill a peak second upgrade team. Making it a show is more important, especially if you can make it look like it's easy and you're having fun."

"We can do that." Xin'ri grinned widely.

Sophia found herself grinning right back; she already had some ideas. Their entire group was flashy; on top of that, they had Taika. He could easily pretend to be a companion of Dav's and add illusions to the mix if they really needed flashy. Three days would be plenty of time to plan.

Once they agreed and walked out the door, Xin'ri turned to Jax. "Have you ever flown? Three days is really tight, but I think I can make something really basic. It's not going to have great control, though; I think it's going to be a jump-and-glide system. I can make something a lot better for you afterwards, but there's no way I can have that ready in three days."

Sophia blinked. She thought Jax already had a way to fly; she remembered him talking to Xin'ri about what he wanted. Maybe it just wasn't done yet?

No, that couldn't be right. She'd seen him float. It was slow and intended mostly as an emergency measure in case he fell, but it did let him jump off a cliff safely. "Oh. You don't want to use the bubble at all then?"

"If we have to, we will," Xin'ri clarified. "But it doesn't match the theme at all and it would look really odd in an aerial fight. It might work for me, since the Morrigan flies by turning into a crow, but Bennu is a bird. We need to make it look like flight. Gliding is close enough. I want the permanent version to look like wings of light, but there's no way I can manage that in three days."

"Taika can," Sophia suggested. "If you tell him what you need it to look like, he can probably fake it."

"I didn't think he was that good at motion yet." Xin'ri gave a considering look at the backpack on Dav's back. "I'll talk to him this evening."

They walked for several minutes before Sophia noticed that Jax was checking every sign they passed along the way. They were all extremely simplistic and didn't give much in the way of directions, just like the sign where they entered. "Do you know where we're going?"

"Sort of?" Jax didn't sound at all confident. "I know it's around here somewhere and I know what the door says, but I'm not sure exactly where that is." Over their mental link, he added, "I always dealt with the healers, not the people who took the items. There's also a back entrance from the staff areas and it's a lot easier to find … it should be near here, but I think I must be off by a hallway."

Jax was right, as it turned out; he was indeed on the wrong hallway. Once he fixed that, it didn't take long to find the door labeled ARTIFACTS. That wasn't the label Sophia expected on the door to a place where you paid to be healed after a fight, even if it was separate from and more powerful (and expensive) than the infirmary, but once she stepped inside, she knew exactly why that label was on the door.

The room seemed tiny, but that was because it was full rather than because it was actually small. The walls were covered in shelves. Most of them held books that looked old but that were clearly recently dusted, but the shelves behind the attendant held a collection of bottles that Sophia could tell were magical without even trying. The top of the shelving unit itself held a magical sigil of some sort; Sophia couldn't make it out because of the glowing chunk of bluish-white crystal that sat in front of it.

Off to the left was an entrance to another room, but Sophia's view was blocked by a carved pillar. It was less magical than the rest of the items in the room, but Sophia could still see a few traces of where it was once enchanted. The magic of the short pillar that sat in front of it on the table was obvious to anyone; a blue flame shaped like a water droplet holding lightning sat above it, ready to be used for … whatever it was intended for. Sophia couldn't tell; a quick glance at the "flame" only told her that it was some form of concentrated mana.

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The attendant himself was far more mundane than the room. He was an ordinary human with glasses. His clothes were nice, which told Sophia he didn't expect to be in a fight any time soon, but that was really all she could tell about him. When they walked up, he looked up from the book he was writing in, but it was clear that he was still somewhere else mentally. "Do you mean to be here?"

"I think so," Jax took the lead again. "I was told to look for the Artifacts door to, ah, buy a second chance?"

He looked uncertain. Sophia couldn't quite tell if he really was uncertain or if he was playing it up because it was right for his role. The fact that she couldn't tell even with the help of Dav's translation Ability said something about how good his acting was. It probably also said that Dav's translation Ability helped with understanding what someone was trying to express as well as the rest of their body language.

"Ah." The man nodded and set his pen down. "Then yes, you are in the right place. You know that the second chance will only help you on the Arena grounds, of course?"

Sophia nodded; Jax had explained that.

The man looked around the group. He waited until they'd all indicated agreement before he continued. "Good. Then you have a choice to make; what sort of second chance would you like to purchase? There are a number of options, from recovery from deadly injuries or maiming to far faster healing. There are also location limits you can choose; the more extensive the options you choose, the more it will cost. Oh, and are you second upgrade or third, and what level are you? It will cost more if you're at a higher level."

"We're all second upgrade," Jax lied smoothly. "Level eight, we're all new to the upgrade. That's one of the reasons we're here; we want to fight in a place that's a little safer than heading into the Maze. We generally know what changed with the upgrades, but … some of us have been at level eight for longer than others. We need to adjust and the Arena seems like a good place to do that, especially with a second chance."

The man on the other side of the counter gave a professional smile. "Let's get you set up, then. The most common package is recovery in the case of maiming or near-death to a state that can be healed, triggered upon reaching the infirmary…"

It took a few minutes to work through the negotiations, especially once Xin'ri pulled out the collection of very simple wands she'd made to serve as their payment. They were fragile and not really suited for a fight, even before you considered that half a dozen uses would probably destroy them, but they were magic items and they would work to fuel the hack job that connected to the "distal recording node" that was the main memory of the "second chance" system. The fact that at least half of them were fueled with mana taken from the storage containers created from previous uses was neither here nor there; there was no reason not to cheat the system.

They took the "recovery from near-death" package, but Jax turned down the "maiming" option with a mutter about having other methods and a surreptitious glance at Dav. He almost certainly could help someone recover and that made him another possible reason for the Arena staff to try to co-opt their team. It wasn't the primary plan, since the Arena healing staff was probably the least likely to know whatever their trick with the Maze was, but they'd take what they could get.

It cost about double the number of wands that Tiwaz had estimated would actually be needed to heal the entire group from near-fatal injuries. That seemed high, which probably meant that they were taking some for themselves (or possibly for the Arena's profit) and also trying to replace the lost buffer from the "damage" caused when Tiwaz opened the door to the creation chamber and accidentally disabled the second chance system.

The cost was especially egregious when Sophia realized that Tiwaz had estimated the mana cost based on their true upgrades and levels, along with their Body and Core values. Amy was the only one in the group who actually was more or less normal for early second upgrade at level eight, though Xin'ri wasn't too far off. Jax was third upgrade, while Dav and Sophia had wildly bloated Body and Core values, which made them sturdier but also more expensive to restore.

Being charged twice what that should have taken by someone who thought they were all ordinary people at the bottom of the second upgrade was simply egregious. They were definitely being taken advantage of.

Although, come to think of it, hadn't Jax said something about skimming? Maybe that was what was going on.

Or maybe it was just because there was no other equivalent option. The Arena could charge what they wanted for the service; no one else could provide it, after all. What it cost them to provide didn't have anything to do with what it was worth, and it was worth a lot if things went wrong.

"Here are your identifiers; keep them on you so that the second chance knows that you are to be protected. If possible, have them touch your skin while you're fighting. When you level, you'll need to come back here; if you don't update your registration, the second chance may not work properly." The spiel was clearly something he'd said a lot of times, just like his description of how the second chance worked and how they had to pay for it. "Is there anything else you need here?"

Jax shook his head, then paused. "Uh, maybe. Do you sell magical artifacts as well as take them in payment for a second chance?"

"This is not a store," the man warned Jax.

"I know, but I was thinking … you get a lot of artifacts, surely you get some you can't use? Maybe something that's locked to a particular person but that person isn't using it anymore?" Jax hinted. "Maybe something that might be available at a slight discount or in trade for something that you can use?"

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