I took the second portrait off the wall and laid it down on the nearest table. After waiting a moment to see if anything happened immediately, I nodded to myself in confirmation. The room’s layout was far too grid-like for it to be anything else, and actually having empty spots was the cherry on top. There was a puzzle here we had yet to solve.

And the first step was finding out if the letters went in rows or columns. “Jun, can you check around to see if there’s any markings anywhere in the room?”

“Sure.” She stepped back from the portraits and looked around. “Anything in particular I’m looking for?”

“Letters and numbers.” I said with a gesture at the portraits. “Depending on how the room’s oriented, and if the letters are in rows of columns, we could end up with multiple different solutions.”

Jun nodded and began to follow the wall around the room. “And you want to narrow it down to just one option. You should look, too, since separating the portraits is pointless until we know which ones to count out.”

The woman in the portrait stared back at me, and I could swear there was amusement on her face. But no, it was all in my head. “Good point.” I agreed and set the portrait back on its slightly sticky pad that kept it on the wall.

Since I’d already searched a part of the room fairly thoroughly before, I could rule out the tops of all the tables. I definitely would’ve remembered anything like a letter or number, even if it wasn’t extremely obvious, so I got on my hands and knees and went for a different angle. I grunted and muttered in annoyance as my armor scraped along the ground and struggled to get under the tables, but as Mortician had proved just a minute ago, all the ones with spheres on them were more solid than steel. The other tables, however, fell under the absolute power of my slightly raised back.

And by ‘fell’, I mean shifted slightly. And a few of them actually fell over, giving my prior statement real weight. But just like the rest of the dustless room, I couldn’t find a speck of anything under the first row of tables I looked over. And the second was exactly the same. So was the third.

But not the fourth. I crawled halfway down before I spotted a section of carved plastic under one of the tables that had a sphere on top. To ensure that it wasn’t Jun playing a trick on me I raised my hand and tried to scratch the plastic myself, but I couldn’t leave so much as a dent. The number and the arrow beside it were real.

“I’ve got a four and an arrow pointing that way!” I called out and stuck an arm in the direction of the arrow. “So this is row one, and the numbers… go… up? That way?”

I stuck my head out and frowned at the three rows the arrow pointed towards. How, and why, was number one stuck on the fourth row? It should’ve been number four, or number five, depending on which side the count started on. But definitely not number one.

“I’ve got something over here, too.” Jun said, albeit with far less excitement than I’d initially mustered. “It’s weird, though, just like yours. At least we know that the numbers go parallel to the door we made and the letters are perpendicular to it.”

With a few grunts and a little effort I shoved myself out from under the table, my knees scraping against the floor in a noise that would send dogs cowering for the safety of laundry baskets. I opened my interface and quickly annotated my map with the number and arrow I’d found, then made my way over to Jun to see what she’d found.

She gestured at a simple stain on the wall that didn’t look like much of anything. Until she grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to look at it like I was lining up a shot along it. From the new angle, it was very clearly a ‘D’ with an arrow pointing towards the middle of the room.

“See what I mean?” Jun sighed when she felt my posture change. “If I’m understanding this right, that either means we start from ‘D’ here and go all the way up to ‘A’, which leaves us with half of the grid untouched, or we go from ‘D’ all the way down to ‘K’ and completely abandon ‘A’ through ‘C’.”

Jun paused in thought, then shook her head. “Actually, that’s pretty easy to disprove. We’d just need to check all of the portraits and see if any of them list a letter lower than ‘I’.”

“But that doesn’t tell us what we’re supposed to find.” I ran my hand over the stain, trying to scrape it away with my armor, and it too stayed strong. “So… alright. Option one; all of the tables are out of order, and we have to move them somehow. I really doubt that’s the case, since the sphere tables are more than bolted to the ground, but there’s a possibility Mortician could find something in the manual that proves us wrong.”

“I doubt it too, but I guess we shouldn’t discount anything.” Jun leaned against the wall and gestured for me to continue.

I held up two fingers. “Option two; the actual numbers and letters are out of order. We’ll have to find eight different things telling us which thing each row and each column is, and then we go from there. It makes a lot more work for us, but given what we’ve seen so far, at least it’s possible.”

Another finger joined the other two. Options one and two made sense to me, in a sort of puzzle logic way, but option three was just… strange. And I wasn’t sure if it was just me, since it was simpler than the other two. I just didn’t like the idea of it.

“Then there’s option three; half of each row and column is mixed up. So if we started from the top, it could end up as four, three, two, one, five, six, seven, eight.” I gestured at every row of tables as I counted out the numbers. Even theorizing it sort of hurt me, since pure randomness was better than being weirdly disorganized. “And the letters could be the same, obviously.”

“Obviously.” Jun repeated. She glanced back at the stain wall she leaned against, then nodded to herself. “I’d bet that option number three is right. It’d mean there are only two more stains hidden in the room, not eight, so it’s less obvious if we just looked around without any idea. Yeah. That sounds right.”

She pushed off the wall and started walking around the room once more. I hadn’t seen her mark the map in her interface, but she might’ve already done that. Or she was trusting me to do it.

Jun gave me a little wave as she went. “I’ll yell when I find the next one.”

When I finally found another number, it confirmed that the third option I’d put forth was the correct one. Either that, or I was so bad at finding hidden clues that I’d only managed to find one thing after two sweeps of the room. Jun had already found her other stain, hidden on the side of one of the tables, and she’d been helping me for the greater part of an hour while Mortician scoured the manual for any hints.

“God, finally.” I groaned and rose to my knees as I pushed myself out from under one of the tables. “It’s here, carved into the little well between the table and its leg.”

Jun sighed in relief and crawled out from under a table a few down from me. She brushed off her forearms and thighs, even if her armor was pristine, and stared at me as I did the same. I couldn’t tell who was rubbing off on who.

“An eight with an arrow pointing that way.” I gestured at the part of the room we’d decided to call the ‘top’. “So it goes four through one, then five through eight.”

“And ‘E’ through ‘H’, then ‘A’ through ‘D’.” Jun finished with a nod. “We have our grid, as strange as it is. Now we can finally start looking for the right portraits.”

I quickly scribbled the final instruction onto my map, then opened a blank page and started to draw out a grid. It would be a lot easier if we didn’t have to go back and check every single sphere when we wanted to confirm or reject a portrait.

E

F

G

H

A

B

C

D

4

X

X

X

X

X

X

3

X

X

X

X

X

X

2

X

X

X

X

X

X

1

X

X

X

X

X

X

5

X

X

X

X

X

X

6

X

X

X

X

X

7

X

X

X

X

X

X

8

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Sixteen empty spaces out of sixty-four possible. Exactly a quarter. That screamed ‘puzzle’ to me, and I hoped it meant we were on the right track. I grabbed the first portrait, with the listed coordinates B1, C4, and H6. And before I even had to check beyond the first row, it was eliminated thanks to B1 being empty. I set it down on the table below me and moved on to the second, which was A6, B3, and D2. This one was also deconfirmed quite quickly, and I set it on top of the first.

I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Jun was looking back at the room and muttering to herself as she tried to piece together a grid in her head. I tapped her on the shoulder and turned my interface so she could see the grid I’d made.

“Well, that’s a lot more sensible than what I’m doing.” She laughed and shook her head, then set her portrait back on the wall where she’d found it. “We’ve got… thirty-two of these? It shouldn’t take that long to go through all of them.”

“Especially not if we work together.” I agreed and moved one portrait down the line. It stuck a little more than the other two, but not enough to get me suspicious. I still checked the back to see if there was a hidden hint, but it looked just like the back of the other two; flat stone with two clasps keeping it in place. “You can copy the grid if you want.”

“Nah. I like standing next to you.” Jun said casually as she leaned into my arm and plucked another portrait. “When we’re done with all this drowned Scalovera stuff, we should take some time just for the two of us. Actually do something as a couple, you know?”

She set her portrait on the table as I set mine back on the wall. Her words were heavy with barely hidden meaning and I felt her arm wrap around mine, gently pulling me down the line of portraits as she let the implications sink in. It wasn’t like we’d been horrible chaste, but we hadn’t really had any time alone since we got to Rainbow Basin.

A smile tugged at my lips. Rainbow Basin seemed like a nice enough town if a crazy dictator wasn’t running it. As good a place as any for a honeymoon on the all-world.