Sophia tapped her lips as she thought. She was pretty sure that there actually was a way to turn them off for good; if this was part of the complex Tiwaz ran, he could probably do it, and it seemed likely that it was. Even if he didn't directly have control, he'd likely know how to disable them.

That didn't mean that turning them off was entirely safe, however; Sophia definitely had the impression that the interspace conduits were something the Kestii Empire didn't completely understand. They wouldn't have brought in an outsider to do the installation and maintenance if they completely knew what they were doing, and Archon Issvako was definitely an outsider. If she hadn't provided a safe shutdown method, there might not be one after all.

It didn't matter whether there was a way or not unless they went and asked Tiwaz, and Sophia didn't think they were going to do that any time soon. Getting to him secretly was a problem, since the entrance Jax used originally required going into areas restricted to Arena staff, while the exit they used to leave the facility and visit Hollows was most of a mile outside Mazehold, to the south. That was the one she'd pick if she had to, but it was still inconvenient. There were probably other entrances, but Sophia didn't know where they were.

"In a way, it's good that this is a new break," Sweetfire continued, unaware of Sophia's thoughts. "The monsters that come from the destroyed windows are … well, I wouldn't call them nastier so much as stranger. Which is not to say that a cloud of floating jellyfish was fun; I had to depend on my Happy Fun Balls for that one, then wait until another started trying to come through to break it up and re-coat the opening. The stingers couldn't get through my fire, but maintaining the fire everywhere exhausts me all too quickly."

That was the benefit of armor, as far as Sophia was concerned. Not even Xin'ri was completely without armor, though hers was in the form of enchanted robes; a strike anywhere other than the face from a jellyfish likely wouldn't even penetrate. Well, Ci'an might have an issue if she shifted to her owl form, since that was unarmored, but she could stay a long ways away. It depended on how long the jellyfish's stinger was.

Despite that, the idea of fighting jellyfish that floated through the air made Sophia shake her head. She'd heard of things like that in dungeons back home, but it would only happen at higher Tiers when everything was more magical. It sounded like an exciting fight, if the jellyfish had any attacks other than stingers that could be blocked by armor.

It probably didn't, or at least not many. The lizards really only had their tongue attack, after all, and it was all too easy to deal with. Sophia could guess that the jellyfish could probably also entangle attackers, but that was it, and it would be easily dealt with by Sweetfire's fire as well. It might be a bit tougher for her team.

Sophia glanced around, then shook her head. Who was she kidding? She could turn into feathers, Ci'an could fly and stun enemies, Xin'ri could do the same fire thing as Sweetfire in multiple elements, Jax could make grabbing or burning tendrils of light from his shield, and Dav could probably just plain absorb the creature's magic. They all had a way to deal with it even if they couldn't easily move.

"I need one of you to guard this side of the Window while I squeeze around behind it," Sweetfire told Dav as he moved farther into the room. "To close the Window, I need to touch a couple spots on the back of it, and that means I won't be able to see the other side."

Sophia frowned and shot another glance at the Windows. They were tall and skinny, with very little space between them. "Do they move?"

"Hm?" Sweetfire sounded surprised by the question. "No, they're stuck to the stone. Trying to move them too far would mean breaking them."

"Then how are you going to fit behind them?" Sophia glanced back and forth. She was pretty sure there were only a couple inches between the Windows. Sweetwater was thin, but he wasn't that thin.

Sweetwater grinned at Sophia. "I just have to get my arm behind it, I don't have to get all of myself back there. I could manage when I was younger, but today? My arm's enough. I know where to put the mana in."

Sophia blinked. "You know, if all you have to do is put mana into it, I can do that with a feather. None of us have to get back there."

"You won't know where to touch." Sweetfire's expression darkened for a moment, before he shook his head. "And you definitely need to know that. If you put the mana in at the wrong spot, you get even more monsters and then you need even more mana to stop it. I should show you what I know about them, though, you're right."

"I have a better idea," Dav stated firmly. "We should all see what's back there and trying to fit is just not going to work." He lowered his backpack to the ground, then opened the top flap. "Taika? Come on, you surely can't still be sleeping."

"I was trying to!" Taika complained.

Sophia frowned to herself when she saw him; he looked like he'd gotten larger. Had he grown or was that just fat? When was the last time she'd seen him do anything other than eat or sleep?

She actually wasn't sure. He certainly liked his sleep, but he could also be sneaky; he liked to slip out when no one was watching. She only knew that because Dav had looked for him a few times, thinking he was sleeping, and found the bag empty.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

The fact that he was an illusionist didn't help.

"No, you weren't," Dav insisted. "If you were, you wouldn't be muttering in my ear about weird smells. I didn't get any of it on the backpack."

"You smell of it and so does this whole room. Stale and musty but with a nasty sharpness," Taika countered, completely unapologetic about only pretending to sleep. "But fine, what do you want?"

"Can you get behind those things and project an illusion of what they look like from the back?" Dav pointed at the broken Window. "Especially that one."

Taika wrinkled his nose at it. "That's the one that smells the worst."

Sophia gave a short, quick laugh. "Of course it is! That's where they're coming from and we need to shut it down."

"Fiiiiiine." Taika dragged out the vowel. Despite his feigned reluctance, his attitude showed that he didn't actually mind; Sophia was pretty confident that he was happy to help.

Taika scurried halfway to the Windows, then stopped abruptly. "Nothing's going to come out of the other portals, right? Do I need to be careful about touching them? That's not much space and I've never been that close to a portal I didn't intend to go through before."

Sophia blinked, then realized that of course Taika would know them as portals. That was what they were called back home, rather than Windows, even though the shape was different and they didn't look as distorted. Taika came from the same universe as Sophia did; he just remembered it more like a dream than reality because of how much he'd changed since then.

"You have a talking mouse?" Sweetwater sounded perplexed.

"Chinchilla!" Taika insisted. "And yes, I talk. I'm Sophia's familiar, and I'm smarter than she is."

Sophia raised an eyebrow and gave Taika a look. She knew better than to dignify that statement with a response.

Sweetwater laughed. "Of course you are."

It didn't quite sound like he meant it. That made Sophia slightly less tense, but she was still annoyed at Taika.

"So, uh, yeah. Talking chinchilla?" Sweetfire shook his head. "I'm still not sure you can get back there, but you're small enough, you might be able to. Don't worry about touching the other Windows, they're closed. And, uh, we'll watch the broken one to make sure nothing comes out of it."

"My name is Taika." The chinchilla lifted his tail and pranced over towards the Window.

It looked absolutely adorable. Sophia doubted that was the effect Taika meant to have, but she wasn't about to tell him he'd failed.

Taika tried to fit between the Windows' stands, but apparently that opening was too small for even a chinchilla. Admittedly, Taika was a large chinchilla, but it was still a tight space.

He snorted cutely, then backed up and jumped. He went up, then up more, and then up even farther before he started to fall behind the Windows. He tapped the back wall lightly, then seemed to bounce off the back of the Window they were interested in before landing more or less gracefully behind it.

Sophia blinked in disbelief. Taika actually jumped over the Window, and it was over six feet tall. She knew he could jump, but she had no idea he could jump like that.

He hadn't even come close to the front of any of the Windows. Now that she thought about it, that was probably deliberate; she was certain he didn't want to be grabbed by something coming out of them and he wouldn't want to enter one without knowing where it led. Knowing him, though, the more likely reason was the smell. He didn't like it and he didn't want to get it on his fur.

Sophia couldn't blame him for that.

"These are complex. How accurate do you need them to be?" Taika asked.

"The more accurate the better," Sophia answered easily, "That's always true. But I guess we're not going to try to duplicate them or anything, so … maybe just the general idea?"

Taika snorted. "Nothing general about these. At least they're only a few colors. That helps. I think they're all metal, too; gold, silver, copper, brass. The copper's tarnished but the silver isn't, so it's probably not really silver."

Sophia watched the image as it built. Taika started with an opaque black background, then began drawing on it starting at the center. There were four stacked silver circles separated by far smaller golden circles. Each of the large circles contained a smaller circle with a symbol in it, alternating between silver and gold. Once Taika finished that part, a series of smaller glyphs appeared in the wide spots, at the corners of the circles. Oddly, each of the spaces had only a single glyph except for the pair between the middle two circles, which had a stacked pair of symbols.

It meant absolutely nothing to Sophia in and of itself; it didn't resemble any runic language she'd ever seen, not even the ones she'd seen inside Challenges in the Broken Lands. Even so, she had no doubt that it was an enchantment of some sort; no one would go to that level of effort for meaningless decoration and still end up with the almost-but-not-really symmetrical mess she saw. It was too good and too bad at the same time.

"I've never seen it this well," Sweetfire commented, "But that does look like what I've seen before. They're all a little different, but it's hard to work out the details when I can only see them in a mirror."

The differences probably had something to do with the different scenes the Windows observed, but Sophia couldn't be certain of that. She still remembered the explanation she'd gotten about the time-preserving space back in Othala's complex, where absolutely everything about the space had to be exactly identified in the enchantment for it to work at all. It was possible that some of the differences were describing something like the exact dimensions of the object the Window was anchored to.

It was honestly amazing that any enchantments lasted as long as these had. Sophia had heard of enchantments that lasted even longer, but they were generally heavily damaged. This might well be damaged, but Sophia was willing to bet that it also had some way to repair itself.

Now that she thought about it, it seemed entirely possible that the fact that the monsters were like living versions of the repair goo she and Dav used in the interspace meant that they were either the repair feature or a corrupted version of it.

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