***** The Prince’s POV 5:30 AM *****

The defenses of the castle were rather impressive, and presumably rather effective as well, but they didn’t do much against Broohn. Then again, they were designed to stop armies, not a rather determined dragon with an impressive arsenal of tricks up his sleeve.

There was just one problem with his methods.

“Broohn, did we really have to climb in through the garderobe?”

“It’s a hole in the wall that the defenses don’t cover. I fail to see what’s wrong with it.”

“Do you know how many times people have done their business down that hole!?”

“What?” *sniff-sniff* “Oh. Oops. We just climbed into the castle through an alternate chamber pot didn’t we?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. At least your methods for getting us to the hole seem to have burned all of the disgusting off of the wall.”

“My apologies, we don’t use castles much back home, so I had no idea what that was. If I had known, I would have cleansed it much more thoroughly before even thinking of climbing through.”

“Apology accepted. However, I’m still not very happy with you. Now where to from here?”

“We need to go about thirty meters that way,” he replied as he opened the door. “Oh, would you look at that, we’re on the right hallway! In this case, I think his lab is through that door there.”

“My turn to go first,” I said as I walked up to the door.

“Open in the name of the Queen!” I called, pounding on the door. The resulting thuds didn’t sound like I was pounding on the door to a room. They were more like ponding on the wall next to a door. “What’s wrong with the door?”

“You see that yellow stuff that oozed out of the cracks in the door?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s AB foam. It starts as two different liquids, but when you mix them together they eventually expand into an air-filled solid that is useful for plugging unwanted holes in things without much effort. When Bud and I trapped the fake dungeon core, we weren’t sure exactly how big of a room it would be trapping, so we decided to put enough AB foam into it to fill an average Great Hall knee-deep in solidified foam. This room isn’t small, but it’s not that large either.”

“We’re going to have to dig him out aren’t we?”

“No, I have a solvent that will dissolve it, but we’re going to have to rip the door off to get in, which will undoubtedly attract… attention... Why haven’t we seen anyone inside of the castle wall? I mean, I can understand there not being anyone in a random section of hallway, especially at five in the morning, but I wasn’t being particularly quiet about going through the defenses. There should have been someone somewhere at least checking in on what was going on! Heck, there should have at least been a night watchman or ten on top of the walls themselves!”

“That is a very good question. For which I have no answer,” I said. “If I was managing the castle guard, or even just visiting the castle, I would have had somebody ask you what the heck you thought you were doing by now. Actually, given the sheer amount of noise you made taking the shield down, I’d probably skip asking someone else to talk to you and yelled at you myself right then and there.

“I guess the best way to get answers is to bust our way in there and ask Lord Ubaro. If he doesn’t know, we explore the castle until we figure it out.”

“Sounds like a plan. Also, since the door is wooden, it’ll probably be faster to just use my fire breath and burn it off than try to rip it off of the foam.”

“Ok, just let me retreat to the garderobe first. I’d rather not get singed if I can avoid it,” I said while doing exactly that.

“Fair enough.”

“Ok, go!”

Hhhuuuuuhh… WHOOOOOOSH!

“Alright, the door’s gone. I recommend that you stay behind me as I only have so much of the solvent and I’d rather not run out before I get the room clear.”

Without waiting for a response, Broohn pulled out two different devices and pointed them both at the doorway. The one in his right hand was a cylinder with a rounded top connected to a squeezable handle and a finger-sized hollow tube pointed away from the handle. The whole thing was painted in the most eye-searing shades of pink, orange, yellow, red, and violet that I’d ever seen in a simple yet complex pattern that I assumed meant something. The one in his left hand was a tube that was obviously intended to be easy to hold with a wide mouth at one end and four separate empty bags at the other, with one of the bags being a tenth the size of the other three. In contrast to the first device, this one was a rather bland shade of grey. The only similarity between the two was the sheer number of runes that were scrawled across them.

Before I could ask him what he was doing with them, he pointed the first one at the foam and squeezed the handles, letting loose a spray of blue liquid that seemed to melt the foam wherever it touched, producing an ugly greenish fluid, which was immediately sucked up by the other device, slowly filling all four bags.

I didn’t even need to ask to know that the green stuff was bad for my health. Other than the color, which resembled rotten pea soup, there was nothing that I could point to that explained the nasty feeling that I was getting from this stuff.

After watching Broohn work his way around the edges of the room, I eventually realized that the grey thing was doing something to the greenish fluid that was filtering it into the four different bags, at which point it was nowhere near as nasty as it was before. Somehow I doubt it was a good idea to eat the stuff, but it wasn’t giving off the ‘touch me and die’ vibe of the greenish fluid.

It took Broohn about five minutes to clear the outer edges of the room, at which point he started spiraling towards the center of the room. He probably could have gone faster, except there were workbenches that were stuffed full of all kinds of mage-tools, enchanted objects, and other random garbage lining the edges of the room that slowed him down. Clearly, this was Lord Ubaro’s workroom, which explained why there was nobody in the hallway. If something went wrong in a mage’s workroom, it’s generally considered a good idea to be a long way away if at all possible.

It was on the second lap that we found the first surprise: an empty person-shaped hole in the foam with an oddly familiar set of armor inside arranged as if whoever this was had simply collapsed in a heap and then disappeared.

“Can you see what’s up with the missing person?” asked Broohn. “I’d stop and help, but the foam is so dense that If I do it’ll just expand to cover the room again and I’ll probably run out of solvent before it’s gone.”

“Sure,” I said, bending down to examine the clothes. When I picked up the chest armor and held it up so I could get a better look at it, a pendant fell out that I just barely managed to catch with my foot. One glance was all I needed to recognize the pendant.

“Oh, dear. I hope Amandine is alright. What on Earthonia was she doing here anyway?”

“Ah, that makes sense. That’s where her corpse would be if it wasn’t for what the World System did to clean up a bunch of Lord Ubaro’s messes. If I’d known she was your friend I would have told you what happened to her on the way over here. Don’t worry, she and her people are fine now and I can bring you to visit her as soon as we’re done with Lord Ubaro here,” said Broohn. “Speaking of which, you should probably be ready to restrain him momentarily. As soon as I’m done uncovering him, you’ll have about a minute and a half to tie him up before he wakes up.”

“Wait, so you’re saying that this foam has some sedative properties as well?” I asked as I scrounged around the room for something to tie him up with.

“Yes. This particular variant was designed to stop exceptionally nasty riots without killing anyone, so it’s got a whole host of unique properties that make it twenty times as expensive as normal AB foam. Especially the suspended animation component that prevents people from suffocating or bleeding to death among other things. Dear Lord, was that expensive and frustrating to get right. Now get ready to tie him up, I’ll be done uncovering him in 10… 9… 8…”

Fortunately, at this point I found a pair of suppression manacles poking out from under one of the workbenches, which I immediately snatched up off of the floor. In doing so, several more pairs of suppression manacles got dragged out with it making me wonder exactly what kind of experiments he’d been running in here. It’s one thing to give a pair to each of your guardsmen just in case they need them, and there’s usually several spare pairs in the guardroom and the barracks where the guards can get them if they need them. I could see having a single pair in a workroom just in case, but having ten pairs of them in a workroom? Especially as bloodstained as these ones are?

Between the manacles and Amandine’s not-corpse, I was starting to get rather suspicious about Lord Ubaro’s activities.

Turning to where Broohn was working on our prisoner, I saw that the captive was frozen in one position as if he was a statue with a horrified look on his face.

“3… 2… 1… Go!”

I quickly slapped the manacles on him and then snatched the presumably fake dungeon core out of his hands. I’m not sure if it can still do anything, but at the very least I don’t want him throwing it in my face.

Sure enough, about a minute and a half later, Lord Ubaro gasped and fell to the floor, sucking in huge gulps of air without noticing Broohn or I.

In the meantime, Broohn had finished clearing out the last of the foam and started muttering some sort of spell at the two devices. Whatever it was, he finished it and put them away before Lord Ubaro had the presence of mind to open his eyes and examine the room.

“Gah! What are you doing here!? I didn’t invite you here! Get out of my castle!”

“Why did you kill Amandine?” I asked.

He froze, staring at me in shock and a little bit of fear for a moment before yelling, “Because she was a filthy, lying, traitorous dog!”

“So you did kill her. Thank you for confirming that for me. Also, if you’re going to try to lie to me, you’re going to have to do much better than that you fool. I don’t even need any of my Royal skills to know you’re lying. Now, answer my question truthfully this time: Why did you kill Amandine?”

He sputtered again, and I knew that this was going to take a while.