"We don't need to go in order," Errod said, "we could just go in order of how important they are."

I threw my burrito at him. "If you're sure it's not important, don't even list it."

Katrin didn't seem to approve of me throwing food, even though it was all imaginary anyway, but she backed me up. "Errod, we won't know what's most important until we all go anyway."

He didn't look thrilled about going first, but someone had to. "Okay. Uh. My first one is entry number six, the Transcriber. It's in the 'encoding lab', whatever and wherever that is, and it... I think it takes whatever you've got on your Dumine and fully moves it onto your lutore. This feels important because then you guys could remove your Dumines and not be in danger of getting taken over, but I don't know if you can keep growing afterwards, and you almost certainly won't be able to reset if you want to change your build.

"There's some mysterious notes from whoever did all this documentation, stuff that was clearly added later. They say it's likely to overcome objections with using the return function of the Causality Engine. I think Katrin called dibs on that one. No actual notes from anyone else on this one, just an X. So Halenvar or Ulren or Jeort didn't seem to care about this thing, even though Halenvar must have already been planning on letting Tindelus through."

I jotted down my thoughts as he spoke, and then we determined that the next one any of us had flagged as being interesting was number eighteen, which was mine. "Okay, this one is the opposite - it's got a boring ass description, but it's covered in notes from Halenvar and crew. It's about the Planar Lock, which is in the vaults - or, in the kinda lobby area? It's attached to one of the vaults, as... you know, a lock. Also kinda relates to the lutore, in the sense that it checks your lutore and sees what plane you're linked to. This one is interesting for a few reasons.

"First of all, based on the notes Halenvar didn't need to really do anything to get the doomsday device out because the original author already did that, studied it, and then put it back. But I don't think he really locked it up, so Halenvar can't take credit for getting in there. Tindelus was behind some other kind of lock, no details here, maybe they get some points for breaking that one. But the last vault not only is behind the planar lock but it's set to include literally every plane. So you have to be in all planes at once to open it - or, not actually physically in there, you could have some other connection, so like... I could open it if it just needed me to be in Erima and Ematse. I don't know all the details, but I can't imagine you can really be in every plane at once. Some it's literally impossible, others it's... impractical sounds too mild. Anyway, not happening - which was presumably the plan.

"I have the next one too, based on what numbers you two were yelling a minute ago. We can probably skip this one, but I want Errod to have good armor. It's some sort of thing that puts on your armor for you, I guess it belonged to the Clockmaker and all his suits of armor - well, all but the one he was wearing - are in there. It's like a robot valet cabinet or something, sounds very cool. Anyway, it sounds like whoever wrote this broke it but they also managed to pull some of the armor out. So we could do the same thing, maybe. I just don't know how we would re-size it, and if it's packed full of magical stuff like I assume it is having someone adjust it might break something."

Errod looked thoughtful. "Possibly not. If the armor was that dependent on being intact, it would break as soon as it took damage. I don't know much about enchanting, but there are ways to have the actual magic stored in one protected spot."

That sounded right - I remembered my silent shoes having a single metal plate with the actual enchantment on it for the whole shoe. Okay, so the armor was still hypothetically possible. Katrin was up next, and she looked excited. "Number twenty-six is, I think, the 'rivet' that the note you found mentions. I could be wrong, the name in here is the Causality Engine, but some of the notes line up. Actually, this makes it clear that what I'm talking about isn't the Causality Engine, but a part of it. I think the full Causality Engine is the thing that Halenvar was after, and based on the newer notes from Ulren or Jeort or whoever they seemed to think this part was one of the ones locked in the vault. But I think it's actually the one in the throne room."

She made us all turn to the page, though I would have been fine with just taking her word for it. "See, the older notes talk about it being inaccessible - but if this was written by Tantek, he was at war with the queen and wouldn't have been able to get to it in the throne room. Right? This seems to be a key part. The missing bit would be, I think, what's referred to here as the Decision Engine - and that's probably in the vaults. My understanding of the device seems to match with what Ulren said. I think it would find a possible future where the Old Empire was prosperous and stable, and then pull people from that future into the present.

"To avoid a paradox, the forces of fate would then work to make sure that person existed in the future. In that way, the Clockmaker could put a destiny on the whole Empire... I don't know how the Decision Engine worked, or what the criteria were, and there's references to what I think would be more active fate magic rather than just passively letting it work to avoid a paradox. None of that is properly explained here. But the thing in this entry, the thing that I think is in the throne room - well, behind the throne room - is the part that actually grabs someone and yanks them to the present or puts them back."

Errod frowned. "Why do you think it's the 'rivet' then?"

"Because Jake Ross' note said it was aimed at Earth. And Calliope said that the queen pulled Jake Ross to Brinkmar from Earth and was going to return him to the moment he was taken. Right? This device was in her control, and it could do that. And it was clearly targeting Earth. It shouldn't have been; the Empire isn't on Earth, so you wouldn't want to pull someone from there. That also raises the question of what the rules were, how it picked someone. Unfortunately, I don't think we can use it since Yesrin's Loom is gone so this... well, it's interesting, but it's probably not useful in any way."

I wasn't sure about that. I pulled up the book of technical notes I'd found in that room, and flipped through it for a minute. It looked very familiar, and I could dimly recall sitting in Ulren's lab modifying his runic code. He'd based his device on this one, but it was backwards; rather than pulling someone from the future and weaving them into the past, it was taking the whole world from the past and putting it in the present. But as Katrin had said, there were targeting requirements... I'd used my moment of entry as a reference, and Ulren had been using the previous Grand Alignment which almost certainly would have avoided the problem that Sentortzi had told me about. From one Grand Alignment to another, rather than two extra years clogging up the system.

Anyway, the point was that these plans and the others didn't quite match. His had been targeting the prime plane, and these were current - targeting Earth. I pored over them with Katrin's help, and finally found what I was looking for. It was a nonsense reference - if B was Brinkmar and P was the prime plane, you'd expect it to calculate the target by saying it was looking using B→P. I'm looking from here, to there. Great. Instead, it was more like B→(P-(2P)) which might as well have been 'multiply peanut butter by green' for all the sense it made. Katrin was fascinated, though.

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"It's... okay, so you shift your reference point to the prime plane. Then you target... a plane that's in the same metaphysical direction as where you already are, but reversed?"

Suddenly it clicked. It was like saying that the prime plane was the North pole, and it wanted you to get to there and then... go more North. It shouldn't be possible, because anywhere you went from the North pole would be South, but that's what it was doing. "Okay. This... might be helpful. I'm going to study this more, I've been working on a way to use my divination on memories from Earth and this could be a clue. Mine is next, it's badass. It's... a magic sword, fated to kill... something. A demigod, probably. Sounds like it's in a 'in case of emergency, break glass' case which I've just realized is a reference you guys won't get."

I held up the book like it was story time. "There's a sketch, we can see it's for sure not Errod's new sword. There's notes in here that reference beings who have melded with fundamental forces, which sounds very cool. I think maybe the Clockmaker was worried that something would be coming after him, maybe for fucking with Fate or refusing to join the demigod club and have restrictions placed on his political stuff. Anyway, cool magic sword, floating around here somewhere. Keep an eye out."

Katrin was back up next. "There's a device that makes 'badges' for your Dumine. A 'null badge' is a Dumine lock, but you can have other types apparently and they'll either restrict what you can learn or cause you to learn certain things. If we could get it working, it's possible we could get additional abilities. Errod, you could possibly even get gifts from it."

He shook his head. "I'm removing mine, to be safe."

"Well, this might prevent Tindelus from taking you over regardless - maybe if there's a badge on your Dumine it can't get through?"

"Maybe isn't good enough," Errod said, "can you imagine trying to test that theory out?"

Katrin was being weird about Errod wanting to cut his Dumine off, and I didn't want to get into it so I yelled over them and got back to figuring out who was next. It was me, with number fifty - the planar terraforming thing. "Yeah, as mentioned before the guy that wrote this busted the doomsday thingy out and experimented on it. As Jeort told us, this guy used it as a template when designing the curse thingy; there's notes here on how to hook it to the Crossroads for infinite power, and there's stuff about what planes he could borrow shit from if he wanted to wreck everything. I guess he wanted to leave the basic infrastructure intact, though.

"The Clockmaker... from this and from earlier stuff I read or was told I think the idea was to clear out a plane by flooding it with heightened decay from Azeraze - probably not the full void treatment, just enough to make everything break down into dust. And then, for example, if you tune it to Lenderatze you could instantly fill a now-dead plane with nature. Or maybe if you used Nusos it would build a bunch of rooms, I don't know. Anyway, pretty handy. But the big thing here is that there's a note from... I think Ulren, but who knows... and it says the Curse Grinder is breaking down. So that explains why we're getting itchy and having sores but nobody is dying, the curse thing is failing."

Katrin had the next one, at number fifty-nine. "This one isn't particularly important, given what we're dealing with. But it's a design for collecting mana into super-dense crystals, I think for use in the Crossroads facility. It's called a Mana Compression Casing, and I don't understand how it works. It's not that it's complicated, it's the opposite - something this simple shouldn't work unless you already had more mana than you knew what to do with. Maybe it's the alchemical metals, I don't know some of these."

"Okay me next, it's number sixty so I don't even need to ask. It's a thingy that can do exactly what I've been wanting to do! It grabs fate threads and moves them! It's perfect! We totally need to find this thing. There's a sketch, see, it's a glove so I can be cool like Errod. Lots of cryptic notes here, sounds like he had a problem with fate. It says... let's see... 'removing the unwanted destiny from myself will only cause it to go to her next pawn, as prepared by Poicelria's construct', and 'with multiple candidates, it may serve as a way to force attachment to the least willing tool'.

"It also implies he can add conditions to existing fates, which is bonkers. I don't know if that's with the same glove, it seems like it might be something else. It says, 'for a fate that persistently returns, the Clockmaker's method of adding qualifiers may discourage it, though its original use as a limiter of future holders assumes the addition of only already-met qualifiers; possibly if the fate attached temporarily to another target they could be edited to prevent it snapping back?' So that's... pretty wild. Doesn't help with Tindelus or getting Hugh back, but it means I could shift my connection to human Callie somewhere else maybe, and then any shitty fates we get stuck with could be disposed of. Maybe. Okay, my next is eighty-two, who has one before that?"

"I have eighty," Errod said. "The Assembler Forge, it sounds like some sort of automatic magic item maker." He made a face, and I remembered a folk tale about someone making a factory and then getting absolutely murdered by the actual skilled artisans from surrounding towns. The story made it very clear that this guy getting murdered and his factory destroyed was a happy ending - people of this world took craftsmanship very seriously, and I could only assume they would be horrified by how we did things on Earth.

"I'd like to destroy it," he said, "because I'm concerned that Tindelus might be able to use it to equip his army. I don't know how functional it is, the original author has a lot of notes about how hard it was to keep working and it looks like newer notes are about trying to get the alchemical metals out of it to use elsewhere. But still. This one, at least, is clear about where it's located."

"Okay, so either it works and we get to make some magic shit before destroying it, or it's busted and we get rich selling the scrap. Sounds like a plan to me. Uh, eighty-two, the Spirit Binder! It's what it sounds like, and is one hundred percent what Tantek used to make the deadshells. I can kinda already do this, so it doesn't seem important, but I left it on the list because based on the notes I think this thing can also bind... I don't know what to call them, not spirits but like... fundamental forces of reality? The notes also say they can't figure out how it did it, and that there's some prep work needed to weaken them or trap them first or something. But still, that's pretty interesting.

"And then I also have eighty-five? Nobody for eighty-three or eighty-four? Okay, so this one is actually important, and we need to get to it. Brinkmar is naturally hard to breach, but back in the day you could use the portals any time, not just when the planes were aligned. There's a seal on it! It's a device, and we can just turn it off! Well, no, it's probably not that simple or Halenvar would have already done it, but the point is there's a... doodad, a thingy, that we can just destroy or de-activate and not have to wait for the next alignment to come back. Which is good, if we need to leave before saving Hugh."

Errod in particular looked excited - I knew he hadn't wanted to leave without stopping Tindelus, but we didn't have any way to do that right now. This might get him to let us go. Of course, I didn't point out the problem... all the portals were heavily guarded or destroyed at this point, and almost all were under Empire control which was bad since the Empire was probably about to be under Tindelus' control. I figured most of these issues would come up later, but for now I leaned back to listen to the final entry.

"Number ninety-nine," Errod said, "which is just labeled as 'containment tube'. This one, if I'm reading the notes right, is a big glass tube with a demigod stuck in it. I assume it's the one Jeort told you about. As with my last one, I know right where it is."

We talked about it for a while, and despite all these options most weren't sounding super helpful. They were good as information, maybe, or they were kinda neat but too dangerous, or we didn't know where they actually were. In the end, there were a few we could agree on. We would try to get to the Planar Seal and deactivate it - or better, selectively de-activate it for us while leaving it locked for everyone else - and we'd find the demigod and have a chat in case he could answer any questions. If we found a magic sword or glove so I could match Errod, that would be amazing - but I wasn't going to hold my breath.

"Okay," I said. "Demigod, then seal, then we leave Trallanar and head for an exit. If we see Hugh we try to save him, if we see loot we take it, and otherwise we just try to be as sneaky as possible so we don't die or get mind controlled. I'll read up on this rivet thing and see if I can crack how to look at Earth memories, you guys get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be scary as shit."

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