NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 1664900" data-attributes="member: 143">We're getting close...* * * * * Chapter 183Zenna looked around at her new surroundings.  Her first thought was of Morgan. What have you gotten us into now, priest?.  The room was small, fashioned of seamless blocks of perfectly smooth stone.  There was a decided yellowish tint to the diffuse light that seemed to shine from everywhere at once.  The only feature were the five portals set into each of the room’s five walls. There was no sign of the others.  She was alone.  As far as she could tell, she’d just materialized in the center of the room.  She studied the five portals.  Each had an opening shrouded in vague mists that bore a slight coloration.  They matched the colors on the floor of the chamber of the Starry Mirror, she realized.  There has to be a pattern here, she thought. “Zenna?”The voice was Dannel’s, and it sounded faint, distant, as if echoing through a dozen twisting tunnels to reach her. “I’m here!” she shouted. “It looks like we’re all in different rooms,” the elf replied.  “I told yer this be foolish!” Hodge’s distant yell came. “Morgan?  Are you there?” Mole’s voice came. There was a delay of a few seconds, then they all could hear the cleric’s words.  “Yes, I am here as well.  I am... sorry.  I have tried several portals, but they all lead back to these rooms.”“Maybe we can meet up,” Dannel suggested.  “What color rooms are you all in?”They discussed the situation further, but from what they revealed, and what Morgan told him of his own experiments, it seemed as though each of their rooms were unique and apart from the others.  Morgan had started in a blue room, and had left a coin lying on the floor.  Later, when he returned through another blue portal, the place was again empty.  “An endless maze,” Mole said.  “There must be a pattern,” Zenna insisted.  “Alek found it, even if by accident.”“With six colors, the number of permutations is very, very high,” Dannel reminded her.  “We could be here for some time.”Zenna considered it intently.  “Perhaps not.  I wrote down the color pattern from the exterior room, remember?”She read off the colors in order, and they decided to follow the order, stepping through the proper sequence of portals.  But the experiment failed, and they found themselves in empty rooms again, no closer to an exit. “What about magic?” Arun asked. “The entire complex radiates magic,” Zenna said, having already thought to use detect magic.  “But I have no spell that can give us an easy answer.”“What about you, Morgan?” Dannel asked.  But the cleric had grown silent, and did not respond. “Well, if anyone else has any ideas...” the elf began.A distant sound of metal crashing on stone became audible to all of them.  It took Zenna only a moment to figure out the source. “Hodge, I don’t think that bashing down the walls will be a solution.”The dwarf’s voice was tinged with a bit of exertion.  “Well, blast!  I’ll be damned if I’m gunna be trapped in here fer’ever now!  What kind o’ crazies would build a place like this?”Dannel said something dry in response, but Zenna barely heard him.  Her mind was whirling, following something Hodge had said...“Dannel,” she finally interrupted.  “You still have that silver plate, right?”A pause.  “Yes, it’s right here.  Did you have an idea?”“Those six-armed skeletons, that odd chair-sculpture... I think that the creature on the plate is the race that build the Voice, at least the complex where we found the hags and the mirror.”Dannel’s voice came back marked with excitement.  “Yes, and there’s a five-sided figure here, and some markings!”“What are the markings, again?”The elf described them, a series of ovals with dots or bars beneath them.”  Zenna drew out her notebook again, and wrote them down as he spoke.  For a long minute she studied them. “Zenna?” Mole asked. “I think I have something,” she said.  “These symbols could be numbers... if I had a guess, I’d say they form a sequence: four, five, six, one, two, three.”“All well and good,” Arun said.  “But what does it mean?”But Zenna had already turned to the notes she’d taken in the room with the starry mirror.  “The ring in the floor,” she told them.  “It forms a progression; from the carving it was clear that there was one intended route around the circle.”“Ah, and the numbers tell you which color to choose,” Dannel said.  “Brilliant, Zenna!” “This is all just theory,” Morgan said.  “Well, I can think of one way to test it,” Mole said.  “Zenna, I’m in an orange room.  What door do I choose?”Zenna read her the correct pattern, using the numbers and the color-circle.  Mole’s voice followed as the walked through the path of doors, and finally her voice came to them, excited.  “I’m in a room with only one exit!  I can see the vault, and Alek!”“Great job!” Dannel said.  “Zenna, you have the key, you’ll have to walk us each through...”As the others followed her directions, the echoing voices of her companions disappeared, one by one.  Finally, she was alone.  Taking a deep breath, Zenna followed the pattern herself, passing through empty rooms and selecting the right portal in the order that she had deciphered from Dannel’s silver plate. Finally, she reached the last one.  She could see the vault, her friends visible together on the far side.  Pausing to take a deep breath, she stepped through...</blockquote>

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