"I have some wands that don't have to be locked to be used," Ebayne boasted with a grin. "They're simple, but simple doesn't mean powerless. They are more expensive, of course. For most wands, I either show them off myself or use a mana disguiser I designed. It's expensive to use, but it lets anyone use a wand keyed to me without locking it."

Ebayne was definitely proud of his mana disguiser. Sophia wanted to see what he was talking about; it might give her some ideas on how to deal with enchantment locks faster, as long as it wasn't as simple as it sounded.

So why not ask?

"Can I see it, maybe even use it with this wand?" Sophia stopped, then frowned. "No, wait, that won't work, will it? You made this wand, so it should work with your mana. Only … huh. No, it won't. You only blocked the imprint part against your mana, not the part that makes it work. In fact, it's not quite as good without the imprint, is it?"

"I haven't managed to overcome that," Ebayne admitted. "But that simply means that it will perform better for you once you buy it than it does during testing, so it's fine! Most wandsmiths don't allow potential buyers to test wands before purchase; the mana disguiser is my own invention. It does require approximately double the normal mana quantity and accuracy is severely reduced, but that means it will be both cheaper and easier to use well once you bind the wand to yourself after purchase!"

Sophia blinked at Ebayne. It was clear he'd said that enough times that he slipped into his sales pitch without considering that the situation was different. If that meant he'd let her look at the "disguiser," she wouldn't complain.

The door behind the counter led to a hallway. Ebayne took them to the right, where another door opened into a large room that had to be the testing room. It was easily three times the size of the entry room in any dimension, with some targets set up in various places around the room. Most of them were simple stands that held something, like a miniature bale of hay or an actual wooden shield, but Sophia also saw other "targets" that were clearly intended for wand effects that weren't purely destructive, from a bowl of water to a small firepit.

One of the walls was reinforced with metal. About halfway across the room, a foot-thick stone wall rose to about as high as Sophia's shoulders between the entrance and the metal wall. That area was clearly intended for more destructive wand uses.

Ebayne waved Sophia over to the short wall. "Put the fireburst as close to the wall as you can, low if you can manage it. It will be small enough that we should be fine on this side of the wall; it is a second upgrade explosion, so nothing should reach us here other than a little heat, but it's always best to be careful. I'm not as sturdy as you Called are."

Sophia shrugged to herself and followed the wandsmith's instructions. The blast was honestly a little disappointing; sure, it was definitely fiery and she did feel a little heat on her face from the warm air it created, but she could make a better fiery spellform than that without using a wand, and she was not even close to a specialist in fire magic. Admittedly, it would take her between five and ten minutes, which was an eternity in a fight, but she could still do it.

Ebayne seemed far more surprised than she was. He tried to cover it up, but Sophia was fairly certain that up until he saw the explosion, he didn't actually believe she could overcome the lockout on a wand. Despite that, he only froze for a second before he pasted his professional smile back in place. "You can bypass a wand-lock! Does it work only for you or can you do it for someone else? Can you remove it completely, or do you have to be there to make it work?"

Sophia glanced down at the wand in her hands, then admitted the truth. "I don't know, won't know until I look at each enchantment. This one I can remove and reset, but I think it frayed the enchantment a little. Right now it's set to my mana signature."

"When you say it frayed the enchantment, what do you mean?" Ebayne sounded puzzled, which made absolutely no sense.

"I mean it damaged the enchantment, not much but a little, like, oh, I stretched the enchantment a little and it didn't quite return to the way it was before I stretched it. It'll probably fail a little earlier now, that's all." Sophia frowned at Ebayne. "A dozen uses or so, maybe? It wasn't much, but it'll add up each time it changes hands."

"Ah, of course," Ebayne stated slightly tentatively. It was clear that he only understood that the wand was damaged, but that was enough. His expression shifted to a professional smile. "Then that means someone else can use it? I think that we can make a deal. If you unlock all five of these, you can keep one."

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"That's a terrible deal," Jax jumped in. "You'll get a lot more for them if you can sell them as wands than you will for recovering the parts. We get three, you get two that Sophia unlocks. Our choice."

Ebayne shook his head. "And let you take the best three? I'd be better off salvaging them. Two, and I get to pick which ones, and only if you unlock them all."

Jax chuckled. "Tricky, but you and I both know that you'll pick any that Sophia unlocks and stick us with any she doesn't. So let's make that part of the deal. Sophia, are you certain you can at least manage to unlock a wand for someone if you're there, so that they can use it from then on?"

Sophia glanced at the wand in her hand, then at the ward that surrounded the building. They were all a little different, but they shared one thing: they were all horribly designed from a security perspective. She'd been breaking wards that were designed better since she was ten. "Yeah. It depends on how they're made, but I can do that much."

Jax nodded like she'd given the answer he wanted. "Good. Then we get two, our choice, but Sophia will return to key the wand to whoever you sell it to if she doesn't manage to completely open it up to taking a new owner."

Ebayne glanced down, then nodded to himself. "Fine, as long as it's not the two most expensive wands."

"Which are those?" Jax asked immediately. "You can't tell us that it's whatever we pick, you have to tell us which ones it is ahead of time."

Ebayne shrugged. Sophia got the impression he hadn't intended to cheat them that way. "The staff, obviously. It creates a third upgrade spell suitable for use in the Maze. Second is a bit harder. I think it's the wand with a spiral pattern; it's one of the ones I know only a little about, but I have a general description. It's a third upgrade camp tool that can move dirt and maybe even stone; moving earth in large quantities quickly is useful to almost everyone."

Jax's eyes flickered to Sophia a moment before she heard his mental voice in her head. "We can't take the staff; we really can't take anything he calls third upgrade. I know you can probably use it, your Core's insanely high, but it would give away too much."

Sophia wasn't sure she liked that. She could think of a dozen different ways to use an earth-moving spell if it really was as shapeable as Ebayne seemed to think. She waved at the wand with the spiral pattern. "You said it's a camp tool. Can someone at the second upgrade use it, or do they have to wait until they're third upgrade? I'm sure the staff's offensive spell won't be powerful enough…"

Ebayne shook his head. "They're both very inefficient if you don't have enough mana, much less effective for only a little less mana. That makes the staff almost useless without a high Core. The wand, well, if you're willing to do less and spend enough time and mana, you can probably still use it. Just be careful when you run out of mana."

Sophia nodded. That felt sort of like a win against Jax, since it meant they could at least take the wand if the other options weren't that useful. "What are the last two? I know about the explosions wand, of course."

Ebayne tapped a wand that looked like it was made from charred wood. "This is the other one where I only have a description, but it matches the materials. It holds a forked lightning spell at the second upgrade. It's possible to hit several creatures with it, but it's mostly designed to strike a single creature, then dance around them until it dissipates. It does relatively little damage, usually, but the lightning can pass through a shield and disrupt a creature, possibly even knock them out. There's also a chance it can kill the target outright if it disrupts the right thing inside the body, but that's rare. Don't count on it. It's second upgrade but fairly strong, so it generally works very well on anything with a Body of ten or so. By the middle of the third upgrade and a Body of twenty, it's not very useful. That's why it was traded to me; the man who used it wasn't able to use it effectively in the Maze, so he sold it for something more useful."

Sophia blinked at that. She knew her Body and Core were unusually high from what Jax and Xin'ri had said, but hearing Ebayne estimate a twenty as mid-third upgrade was surprising; her Body was already eighteen and she was at the bottom of the second upgrade's level range. Maybe he was talking about a monster that didn't specialize in Body? That would make more sense.

Alternatively, it was possible that the man who sold it to Ebayne simply didn't have a high enough Core to stand up to monsters with higher Body. It was hard to say without testing out the wand, and that would require a target. Sophia wasn't about to use a lightning wand that had a chance to kill its targets against any of her friends. That didn't lower it on her list, however; it sounded very useful and like it could do something her party didn't have a specialist for.

"The last one is a bit of a mystery," Ebayne added as he indicated a wand that seemed to be made of silver with a red gemstone set into the wide end. "It was found in the Maze, so no one knows anything about it; it was sold to me as scrap. The materials I can see are consecrated silver and a flameheart ruby. Both are useful, but coating the outside of a wand in consecrated silver is pointless and flashy and the flameheart ruby should be at the focal point of the mana, not the rear of the wand."

Sophia turned towards Xin'ri in the hope that she'd have some idea when even the wandsmith didn't.

"Let's leave that one for last," Xin'ri answered Sophia's implied question. "I have some thoughts about what it is, and if I'm right, it would be perfect for Jax."

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