The map had straight lines indicating hallways and large circular or rectangular enclosed shapes indicating rooms. This she could understand. What she couldn’t understand was everything else. Ruciella had not bothered drawing the doors to the outside of this building. There were over two dozen geometric markings of ellipses, triangles and triangles scattered on the map in seemingly random fashion. There was no unique symbol indicating where she was and where Chamber 13 was.

Ada said to herself. “Well, there’s no reason for anyone on Urth to follow terrestrial conventions of using a five-pointed star to indicate points of interest such as the current location.”

She continued after a pause. “Still … there should be a legend for even a local person here to be able to read this map unless everyone knows what ellipses and triangles mean. The officials school one that old demigod gave me at least contained a legend.”

She turned the tablet around and saw there was nothing exceptionally notable on the back except large letters in the local language imprinted in the center. It was probably either the name of the mage who made this or Ruciella’s name in Exicozan. Either way, this was not helpful. With a sigh, she turned the tablet back around to see if she could glean something out of it with a second look.

“Woah!” she gasped while she was turning it around.

The drawing of the map had flickered to be replaced by what looked like a map legend. At a glance, she was two unique symbols with English in very poor handwriting adjacent to it. One read “Here You Are” and the other “Where You Need To Be”. The former was represented by a shaded isosceles triangle inscribed within a tiny ellipse and the latter was represented by a larger similar isosceles triangle within a large ellipse.

“Scale factor of dilation appears to be five between the two looking at the length of the semimajor axis of the ellipse,” she remarked offhandedly.

Ada turned the whole table flat and the legend disappeared. Experimenting a bit, she found that the legend only appeared when it was tilted less than 20 degrees from the vertical direction. It wasn’t too awkward to tilt her head slightly to be able to read it. Ada thought of the lenticular picture she had at her bedroom at home which turned from a floating astronaut when gazed at directly and a dancing one with Earth in the background when gazed from the side. It’s quite remarkable to see lenticular printing here without modern technology. I wonder if it’s using physics or some kind of magic. Whatever it is, this device is more complicated than it looks. If I ever get home, I’d like to take one of these.

She took a few seconds and memorized the legend before looking at the map again. From where she currently stood and given the scale of the hallways now that she understood where things are, she estimated it would take less than ten minutes to reach her destination. The acute triangle shape with the side of the smallest angle was the equivalent of the arrow symbol commonly used on Earth to designate direction towards something. Triangles with the same acute angle all indicated the direction to follow to reach a particular destination which was marked by the same acute triangle inscribed within an ellipse.

Ada had no idea why Ruciella bothered to draw out the other points of interest which were not Chamber 13 but perhaps the girl was just overzealous in her demonstration as a guide. Chamber 13 was uniquely labeled in that its inscribed triangle was shaded. The path towards there was indicated by ellipses which grew larger towards the Chamber.

One of the perks of being a Goddess of Computation is not having to constantly check back the map for where to go. I look once and I have memorized the whole thing. She smiled to herself as she walked along the empty hallways with the map in her mind. She was quickly thankful for Ruciella’s map since unlike the map, the actual hallways had no signs at intersections or along its walls indicating where various rooms were. There were words on signs but they were in Exicozan and completely illegible to Ada.

Ada sighed. “I must be in one of the few isekai stories where the MC is not blessed with the gift of understanding all languages or at least one local language upon arrival.”

Since there was no one else around, Ada felt perfectly comfortable conversing with herself. “Even on Earth, I never cared to learn any language except for English and now I’m sure I’ll be soon obliged to learn the local tongue. They do have libraries here and somehow I doubt that the books I would want to read would all be in English.”

“Why was English chosen anyway as the Divine Tongue here? Does that mean this world was created from our planet after the British and later America rose to prominence so English actually became the international lingua franca? Or … maybe since the System interface is similar to POSIX and gods are users on this System and since POSIX commands use English, this is why English is the Divine Tongue?”

Ada’s speculation was hurting her own brain and so she stopped. Sometimes when her mind spiraled like this, she felt as if she was a character in a story bounded by the confines of its internal logic. This wasn’t going to go anywhere and she knew it.

“Kazza wazza sazabala?”

A series of nonsensical words reached her ears and she looked up in surprise. An odd bald little man with a plain brown robe wearing a ridiculously tiny red cone hat was sitting on a wooden crate next to a small closed wooden door. He looked like a village idiot but she was no judge of the meaning of local attire. A cone hat might imply this man was the Magister himself for all she knew.

Ada recalled this location from the map as an endpoint of one of those arrows which meant it could be an important place. Playing it safe, she decided to pay the man the utmost respect. “I apologize, kind sir, but I am not a local here. I am not here to cause any trouble. I am headed to Chamber 13 which I believe is further down this hallway and then a right turn.”

“Sazza washaba rasaka walabaja.”

The man continued with meaningless words to Ada’s ears. His finger pointed down the hallway was more indicative of what he meant. Following his finger, she looked and saw a small white rat skittering towards her from the end of the hallway. It squealed quite unpleasantly. Unlike many girls, she was not squeamish when it came to little critters like rats. However, when another one appeared and then another one followed by a dozen and then two dozen more. Scarcely a second later, over a hundred appeared around the corner. At this point, she decided there were enough rats to be justifiably fazed.

“Dalasa rataka wazza,” the man said as he shifted his finger to point at the door beside him. Ada interpreted this to mean that he wanted her to go through the door for her own safety.

Should I follow this strange man to this strange little room which is clearly not Chamber 13? But what if something happened there and I shouldn’t approach closer? But I’m a goddess so a few or maybe I should say a lot of rats shouldn’t be able to hurt me. Also, I’m short on time. Her mind flashed and she made her decision. Ada shook her head. “I’m sorry but I can’t follow you. I need to get to Chamber 13.”

Though he might not have understood her, she knew that he understood what she meant. The man’s face twisted into a scowl and with one smooth motion, he jumped off the crate and slipped through the door. Without waiting for her to change her mind and follow, he shut the door and she heard an audible sound of a door being locked.

Sighing, she shifted her gaze from the door towards the hallway where the rats were rapidly approaching. “Time to face these little guys. I have no idea where these rats came from but they don’t look the stereotypical giant rat monster found in some games.”

To her, they looked like ones that might have escaped from a lab. Do researchers perform magical experiments using rats as test subjects here? That wouldn’t be completely out of the question. Further speculation would lead to no action and she needed to respond immediately. “I don’t like to engage in animal cruelty. I could just let them crawl over me but that sounds really gross. There must be some way for me to just avoid them or rather for them to avoid me.”

By this point, there were at least two hundred rats with the closest ones only ten feet away. She called upon systemhelper.

...

...

...

...

...

Ada recalled that rats hate strong smells and garlic definitely has a strong smell. Unfortunately, the same situation of being unable to create organic matter applied. That ruled out also using onions, cayenne peppers, cloves, clover plants, peppermint, eucalyptus, cat fur, vinegar, and citronella oil. Ada sighed. “Well, here goes what could be a terrible solution…pun totally intended.”

...

Concentration in percentage describing the mass percent of ammonia

Volume in cubic meters describing entire solution

Variable types:

Float, float>

...

>

...

Otherwise default constructor utilized>

...

...

thank you and goodbye>

...

Ten cubic meters was clearly overkill. A huge block of ammonia fell on the rats and doused them in the foul smelling liquid. The hundreds of rats were swept down the hallway in the same direction that they came from. There were squeals of shock and what Ada hoped sincerely was not the final death cries of these little guys. She thought she would be thoroughly drenched by the chemical solution but not even a single strand of hair or her attire was affected. When the solution splashed on the floor and walls, all the liquid that approached her had deflected away as if she had a personal force field.

When the ammonia solution disappeared from view, she called up systemhelper again and cleaned up the mess by changing every lingering solution puddle that she saw to air. No doubt she missed some but that’ll be for the local janitorial staff to handle. There must be some functionality in the System which would allow her to transform the desired object in her vicinity to a Cloud which would automatically be at her floating palace. Unless an entropic process entailed higher entropy for transforming back into a Cloud, if she could pull material from there to here why shouldn’t she be able to transform and send it back?

She wished that the rats were easier to clean up but there was nothing she could do there when she saw dozens of rats flinching in their final death throes. She muttered. “Maybe it’s just the human part of me. Not fear at all but disgust. I just didn’t want to wade through a sea of rats even though logically I know that nothing bad would happen to me. Now, they’re the ones that have to suffer and some even die.”

As she walked past the dead rats, Ada comforted herself in thinking that these rats would have had a very short miserable existence in a lab. She wanted to confirm this with the professor or student who was responsible for the great rat escape. It didn’t really matter at the end of the day but it would make her feel better knowing that she was not a mass rat murderer.

A feminine voice appeared around the corner of the hallway which was in the direction of Chamber 13. “With your divine abilities, you could have just created a large cage and entrapped all of them. Why did you decide to inflict such pain on them?”

Ada turned the corner and saw a large oval door which opened up to a gigantic circular room lit by concentric torches placed in wall-mounted sconces. In front of the door paced a stern looking elderly woman with greying hair and a few wrinkles. She had her arms crossed and stopped pacing when she saw Ada. Turning her gaze to the goddess, she continued before Ada could utter even one word. “Well, Master Arbon has told me that you are a strange one willing to turn to mortals for help. I only hope that you’re not as callous or stupid as most of them are.”

If she wants a battle of words, I have a few things to say to her. Ada thought. She opened her mouth to retort but then closed it. This might be part of the test even though she was not physically yet in the room. She bowed. “Respectfully madam, I apologize and I do agree that I could have thought of a better method of handling your rats.”

I did think of using a cage but that would need to be very large and the hole size needed to be small enough so that the rats won’t go through. And if I did that how would I cross the hallway to reach the other side with a giant cage in the way? She wanted to voice aloud these thoughts on the impracticality of creating a proper cage to handle the rushing rats but decided that neither revealing the limitations of her power nor starting a verbal spar were good choices for someone who was soon going to be testing her.

The mage nodded. “Apology accepted. They are not my rats. They are my colleague’s. In a way, I don’t mind that some of them perished. This is a lesson he can learn from. The cage door was open and being the distracted mage he is, all of them escaped. Discipline has gone downhill ever since …ah, why am I telling you this? The cleaning staff will take care of this eventually. We have more important matters to attend to. Follow me. You are late and we need to get started.”

Without waiting for Ada to answer, the mage turned and walked through the door. Ada thought the first impression could have gone a little better but the actual trial has yet to begin. Her heart fluttered in anticipation as she stepped inside the chamber. The door automatically closed slowly behind her with a loud clang and all the torches simultaneously went out leaving the entire room suddenly pitch black.