"I kept trying to log out and it wouldn't let me! We're stuck in here!"

Silva stared up to one corner of her eyes. "He's right. I'm stuck too."

"What sorcery is this?" Damwise exclaimed.

"Stop that shit!" Sashimibandit said, standing up so he could loom over the dwarf.

"Hollen," Silva said. "We need help. A moderator or something. Our menus are fucked up."

My automated systems didn't exist down here, so there was no answer. I could have spoken, but I didn't have any way to help. My communications were as limited as theirs, and as they already suspected Lawlimi of some kind of nefarious duplicity, he was likely correct in keeping my inexplicable existence a secret.

"They can't hear us!" Sashimibandit said. "No one can!"

"Troubling thoughts, Master Sash." Damwise, whose commitment to RP I was beginning to appreciate, rubbed at his chin somewhere beneath all the facial hair. "So, what is our path from these dark woods?"

"There are no woods!" Sashimibandit screamed at him.

"We need to heal," Lawlimi said, "and then keep going." He walked to where Sashimibandit's Bokken was still embedded in the crotch of a Mechanoborg and tried to tug it out. He was awkward with one hand, and he ended up pulling the whole corpse instead.

"Go on? We can't go on! We're gonna die for real if we can't log out soon. My mom's gonna find my dead body!"

"You're not going to die," Silva said, gently putting Lawlimi to one side and casually retrieving the sword herself. "It would take days for you to die from dehydration, so unless your chair is set up on the train tracks, we've got time. Lawlimi is right. We've got one direction to go and that's forward. Damwise, whistle that tune of yours until we're all fully healed. Sash, calm the fuck down." She tossed him his sword and he caught it. "Whatever fucked up half-baked shit this is, we're gonna play it out."

No one argued. Damwise tended to everyone as best he could, though he was nearly out of tinctures and poultices by the end of it. Lawlimi's crystal affinity made it difficult for him to heal unaided while granting a bonus to magical healing. The potions Damwise carried would have been wasted on a third level, so he covered his stump in a poultice instead.

"You can always get it regenerated," he told Lawlimi reassuringly.

"I've been studying this thing," Silva said of the miniaturized blueprint. "I think it’s only a partial. This place should have more."

This time, I did not have to tell Lawlimi where to look. There was a small case on a shelf above the workbench that caught Damwise's eye. He had a knack for finding treasures. Inside the case were thirteen metal plates, new maps as well as a copy of the one they had.

>>

[Quest Completed — The Dollmaker's Error]

You have survived the Mechanoborg's ambush, and discovered the hidden treasure of the factory, a complete map of the facility! Now it is up to you to decide the course of your adventure.

(Silva gains 500 XP)

(Damwise Gamgy gains 500 XP)

(Lawlimi gains 500 XP)

(Sashimibandit gains 500 XP)

(Lawlimi has enough experience to advance in level)

>>

"We're all gonna die down here," Sashimibandit whined.

Silva and Damwise cleared off the workbench and arranged the steel cards like a puzzle. Some of them clearly coincided with each other, while some seemed unrelated. Lawlimi watched them working, and I explained what he was seeing.

Four of the plates represented the ground level of the entire castle complex. Two detailed the upper levels of towers and spires, adjacent on the cards if not in actual space. The rest were underground, which meant that this castle was built like a mature oak, as much wood below as above. Damwise and Silva eventually came to the correct conclusions.

"Okay squad," she said. "There's a helluva dungeon under this place, but I say we try for the main tower. It’s got a card to itself, and the label says, "Seat of Command", which sounds like a place we need to be. Any objections?"

Lawlimi wanted to try to make himself another weapon, and with my knowledge, we could have certainly put together something, but his missing hand was an impediment. Given what had happened only minutes ago, none of his party members were willing to stay behind and help us build what may have resulted in a second explosion, so he was overruled.

Weapons drawn, they exited the Factory and proceeded cautiously down the halls. Damwise was once again the navigator, reading the cards by the orange light of the glass embedded in the ceilings. They descended a short stair, taking a tunnel to the next structure. There were branching passages here without doors to deter them, but they pushed on. A brief peek down the open passages suggested a presence just missed. The fluttering of a cloak perhaps. Whenever I let my awareness stray from the party I was met with more ruby eyes, gazing too directly at me.

As they traveled, there were plinkings and poppings in the walls, the sort that waterlines make after being shut off. The flooring was covered by stiff rubber netting that looked to have been well used, here and there compressed by what must have been enormous weights. There were no more Mechanoborgs, however, not a hint of them even for me. Ventilation shafts pocked the walls at irregular intervals, and a faint susurrus drew me in.

Snakes, a nest of babies, had a scale pattern that did not match any of the 144 breeds and variants that existed in Mythopoeia. They were black as jet, with electric green diamonds traveling down their backs, and silver markings on their cheeks. They could not see or sense me, but they played with each other like new puppies, still wet from their eggs. I had a good feeling about them.

The passages doubled in size. They had entered the section of the castle meant to be comfortable for giants. The "Seat of Command" was not far off, but the way was blocked.

There was a long, rectangular chamber with an arched ceiling, almost a nave. It was lined with brass statues of a woman, or different women. A quiet congruence among their features suggested that though their faces varied they were all one woman, or at the least consanguineous examples. All were hauntingly beautiful, and all had their eyes sewn shut.

Damwise made the sign of the sword-cross over his heart. "Blessed be," he said reverently. "It's Bemoi."

Bemoi - the Lady, Empress and Queen, Goddess and Fae, she who died every night so that the world might live, who sealed her own eyes so that none might suffer for what was trapped inside of her. The statues were her, and their variations on the theme of her appearance were in keeping with her worship, which was adapted differently to every region that honored her. While the Lord and Lady were bound together, ruled together, they were worshiped separately, the Lord in grand cathedrals, the Lady in private shrines.

At the far end of the structure was a stone door, and before that door was an altar with a wooden deck of cards upon it.

"It's like Character Creation," Silva said, approaching it first.

Sashimibandit eyed the rows of statues warily and refused to cross the threshold of the room. "You know this is going to get blocked off as soon as anyone does anything, and then those statues will kill us."

Lawlimi was sweating profusely, his cheeks bloodless. The analgesic shot was wearing off, and he kept glancing at his missing hand. "Would dying be bad? Maybe if we'd let you die you could have logged off."

"No way I'm going to try it. If I die and I can't log off, that means I'm trapped in my adytum. Alone."

Lawlimi shuddered.

Damwise and Silva were together at the altar. It was covered by a simple black cloth. Lawlimi came up behind them.

"What is it?" he asked.

"The Major Arcana," Damwise said, examining a card. "I won a set like this in a bardic tourney."

"It's Character Creation all over again," Silva said. "See that door? It's just like the one when you start the game."

She was right, though this setting was far removed from that part of the game, there were strong correspondences between the two scenes. This was going to be a puzzle challenge that related to Character Creation. Most puzzle challenges were simple manipulations stolen from early video games; moving blocks around, turning lights on and off, and memory match games were all common. This was not that.

"Then what cards do we choose?" Damwise placed the one he'd been looking at back on the deck. "Bemoi must be part of the scheme, the chamber couldn't be giving us a bigger hint."

"Fine, but we need two other draws, more if there are supposed to be amplifiers."

"We don't have enough to go on yet."

There were twenty-two cards in Major Arcana. Twelve were associated directly with individual deities of Mythopoeia, and six were bifurcations, associated with a pair of deities that shared some kind of relationship. The remainder were amplifiers, extra cards that modify the reading of the others. Each character had their affinities set by drawing from the deck at the beginning of character creation, but in-game, the cards were also used for storytelling purposes.

A player's drawing could be thought of as a signature, or an epithet. The Greenwood Warrior of the North; Direction, element, and hue. That could be Sashimibandit. Silva had originally drawn Judgement, Temperance, and Chariot. She became the Red Fire of Nadir. Who or what was the puzzle asking them to describe with the cards? The Maker, the room, or themselves?

I already knew that the room was empty of clues apart from the statues. But the statues themselves contained a wealth of references apart from the obvious homage to Lady Death. They were all different, and I picked out signs and symbols relating to every deity and every card of the Major Arcana represented among them. The trick then was in the commonalities between the statues. They all represented some form of Bemoi, but each also sported an accessory patterned after alicorn. That would suggest Elali, the Horned God, who shared a bifurcation with Bemoi as well as owning his own card.

There weren't any more plain allusions to the Twelve that occurred on all the statues, but of course, they didn't have to carve in references to the gods when they could reference the cards. Here there was a lighthouse sewn into a robe, there she held a scepter mounted by a star, here there was a vertical bar carved into her face just below the center of her eye. Each statue contained a unique representation of the Tower.

That meant the answer could include the Empress for Bemoi, Temperance for Elali, and the Tower. However, if Bemoi and Elali were a bifurcation it would be the Lovers and the Tower and some third card I hadn't picked up on. The former was more likely, but the order of the cards was still in question.

As I began to work out the myriad possible combination of direction, element, and hue that would each describe a unique story and character, I noticed Damwise was about to take a guess and ruin it all.