“Sandra.”

Sandra ignored her, deliberately walking away without looking back at the changeling.

“Please,” Tarja called. “Talk to me.”

Reaching the wall, Sandra turned, leaned against it, and crossed her arms. She had nothing to say that wouldn’t be distilled in anger, and the rest of the party didn’t deserve to get caught in that crossfire.

Tarja had lied. She had lied, and kept secrets, and put the entire party in serious danger in doing so. If they had come up on a situation where relying on Tarja’s skill and finesse was critical, the whole party could have been killed.

More to the point, she had betrayed Sandra’s trust, and Sandra couldn’t deal with those emotions right now.

Besides, the party had work to do.

Three trials, three party members.

They looked around at each other, eyeing their tasks.

Quinn went first, uncertain until he approached the document. The trial - translating an old ledger - seemed an unusual choice for him, until he sat down and read it.

It was written in Orcish. Sandra had caught that once she sat down to read it, and even if Quinn was no scholar, he was certainly literate. The handwriting wouldn’t be perfect, but the job would get done.

He sat down, picked up the pen, and started writing.

Hadrian was the most uncertain, not because of the task, but because he was still clueless about the drama going on. He started walking towards Sandra, to talk to her, but she shook her head.

He deserved the truth, and she’d give it to him soon, but not just then. She wanted to wait until she could speak without feeling like her words were about to boil over.

Stopping, the wizard looked between Sandra and the challenge, pursed his lips, and walked back to the pit.

Sandra didn’t know how he’d make it across, but he was crafty. Twenty feet across, with staggered rods to provide platforms to jump on, but Hadrian wouldn’t have had the acrobatic skill to land gracefully on those rods even if he wasn’t wearing high heels. The ten foot platform at the starting point would make things worse; having to drop a couple feet with each jump from pole to pole would be incredibly difficult.

Hadrian examined the platform, climbing up the ladder, then sliding back down and walking around it to inspect the poles and the landing pad at the far end.

Once his inspection was done, he started walking towards Sandra again.

“I have a question,” he said.

“About the task, or about Tarja?” Sandra asked.

“Both, but I’ll just ask about the task.” Hadrian reached into his satchel, digging inside. “They took away our spell components and weapons when we came in, but we weren’t strictly banned from magic. Do you think it’s alright if I use this?”

He produced a trio of uncut gems, fused together and bound in a gold circle. The holy symbol of Yuelral.

“I… guess that’s okay, since it wasn’t explicitly banned,” Sandra said. “They seem like very ‘Letter of the law’ people here. You can use holy symbols?”

“A little trick I picked up,” Hadrian said. “It’s a lot easier to sneak in a holy symbol than a spell component pouch, when everyone knows you’re not a cleric.”

“Then use that,” Sandra said. “What are you planning?”

“There was a scholar, Pythagoras. From a different plane. Have you heard of him?” Hadrian asked.

Sandra shook her head.

“Okay then, the simple version. When calculating the sides of a triangle, the sum-” He spotted the already glazed-over look on Sandra’s face and shrugged. “Never mind, it’s not important. I’m using math.”

“I still don’t get it.”

Winking, Hadrian said, “Then watch and learn.”

Walking back to the platform, he focused for a moment, conjuring a little magic. Sandra, focusing on him with her magical detection, identified the type of spells he was doing and tried to guess the exact magic.

Is that… Feather fall and expeditious retreat?

She blinked, getting it.

Taking a breath, Hadrian stepped back, got ready, and then ran forward as fast as he could - which, given the magical buff to his movement, was pretty fast.

He didn’t exactly leap, and it wasn’t graceful at all. When he went over the edge of the platform, he tumbled into the air and started to fall at an unnaturally slow rate. At the same time, his momentum carried him forward at great speed, and he just soared over the pillars that were supposed to be jumped on.

Reaching the far end of the pit, he crashed, which Sandra supposed was a type of landing. Even if it was deeply inelegant, he’d made it across by increasing his horizontal speed and reducing his vertical speed to their extremes.

Math, then.

And that only left Tarja. She was stumbling, unable to really fight, and she had to deal with the bear.

She’s a ranger, Sandra knew. This shouldn’t even be hard.

A part of her wanted Tarja to fail. It was a cruel, mean spirited little part, and she shoved it down. Spite would get her nowhere, and if Tarja failed, they all failed. All Sandra would get was someone to blame.

She watched with anticipation anyways. Tarja dropped into the pit on the far side of the bear, speaking words that Sandra couldn’t comprehend. The bear roared and wailed in response, and Tarja spoke again in her strange, animalistic tongue.

She knows how to speak with animals, Sandra thought. Of course.

The bear cautiously loped towards Tarja, and Tarja didn’t run. She instead crouched, taking the bear’s extended paw.

Sandra was too far away to get a clear visual, but she guessed. Thorns, or needles, or something painful and jammed deep into the bear’s flesh. Whatever it was, Tarja removed it all, patted the bear on its head, and said one more thing before turning to leave the pit. The bear was, by its posture, grateful.

And Tarja couldn’t climb out of the pit. Her grip slipped, and she couldn’t jump high enough to grab up at the ledge and get a leg over the side.

Rolling her eyes, Sandra walked back over, reaching her arm down to give Tarja a hand. Tarja accepted, and Sandra towed her out.

“Thanks,” Tarja said, rubbing at the back of her neck.

Sandra nodded, curtly, and walked away. She didn’t have a destination, she just needed to walk away, and she ended up heading towards Hadrian.

“Man, that was a rush,” Hadrian said, sitting on the ground with one latex-covered leg tucked up to his chest. Surprisingly, his outfit didn’t seem to be tarnished or scraped - Sandra wondered if it was part of the magic that kept the thing on his body. A spell to keep the bodysuit intact would be in character.

“Maybe you should start doing more athletics,” Sandra said. “If you enjoy it.”

“Eh, not enough time in the day.” Hadrian shrugged, opening his mouth to speak again. His vision darted past her, though, and his mouth just stayed open, gaping.

“What?” Sandra said, turning.

There was a big door opening on the inside ring of wall. A big door. Almost comically large. A Tarrasque could have walked through it without destroying anything - though it probably would have just for fun.

Sandra was sure that the doorway hadn’t been there a minute ago.

“I guess we passed,” Sandra said.

“Knew we would,” Hadrian said. “Never had any doubt.”

“Uh-huh.” Sandra looked around. “Quinn, get ready. There shouldn’t be any more challenges inside, but you never know.”

Quinn nodded.

Sandra stayed ready to summon an umbral knife, but there didn’t seem to be any threats inside the enormous doorway, just a passage into a dark chamber with a large raised dais in the middle.

Something about the layout seemed familiar, but she couldn’t quite place it. Walking forward, she passed under the threshold of the doorway and felt a change in the air. She couldn’t quite place what it was - not temperature, not humidity, but something.

“Big door,” Quinn commented, adjusting the hem of his dress as he stepped through the threshold behind her. “Where’s the book?”

“I’m guessing we’ve got to do something with that dais to get it,” Sandra replied. “Hadrian, do you have any idea what we’re looking at?”

Hadrian walked past her, strutting in his heels towards the platform. “It’s conjuration,” he said, after a moment. “I couldn’t say for sure exactly what it does, though. Give me a minute.”

Sandra waited while he did his Wizarding, walking around, inspecting things, making quiet ‘hmmm’ noises every few moments.

“Knowing how thorough Hadrian likes to be… this could take dais,” Quinn quipped.

Sandra glanced at him, but didn’t crack a smile. She was in too bad of a mood to appreciate bad puns.

“Please,” Tarja said, quietly. “I’m sorry, but I knew you had so much on your plate. Don’t blame Quinn.”

Sandra wasn’t sure when the ranger had walked up behind her, but she didn’t look back, and she didn’t keep her voice low or private. “I don’t. Quinn had an impossible choice, either betraying his team or the woman he loves, and we both know he’s a romantic at heart. I don’t envy the dilemma he had, knowing someone would be hurt no matter what he did.”

Tarja made a choking noise, and Sandra regretted the poison in her words, but it was too late to take them back. Before the ranger could draw any more barbs out of her, Sandra walked away.

“Hadrian, how’s it looking?”

“It’s some kind of summoning platform,” the wizard replied. “I can’t say exactly how it works, but I think you use it almost like a catalog - activate it, and it teleports the object you want to you.”

“Why would they do that?” Sandra asked.

“To keep people from looking for things that are hidden. You can’t just come in and clear out the shelves if you don’t even know what’s on the shelf,” Hadrian pointed out.

“Well, keep studying, we need it working.”

“Oh, I can get it working,” Hadrian said. “Standard ritual. I can activate it, I just can’t promise it’ll do exactly what I predicted.”

“Do it, then,” Sandra said. “How long will it take?”

“A few minutes,” Hadrian replied.

Sandra nodded, stepping back and letting Hadrian work his magic.

The ritual wasn’t very complicated, or particularly flashy. Sandra couldn’t personally tell the difference between ‘Wizardly chanting’ and ‘Idle mumbling’ so from her perspective, Hadrian was just sashaying around the dais, waving his hands and muttering every few seconds.

Ignoring him, she tried to put a finger on what was so familiar about the platform. Something about the door… She turned and looked up at the ridiculously imposing doorway behind them, and then back at the platform.

She looked at the doorway again, backing up and getting a look at it from the far side of the chamber. The size had thrown her off, but now that she was inspecting it from further back, she recognized the shape, the design. It was almost like an aiudara, an ‘Elf gate’, but that would mean…

Oh. It’s not a catalog.

“Magicae, magicarum, magicus! Wizardry!” Hadrian finished chanting - or, at least, that’s what it sounded like to Sandra, who wasn’t paying attention to the ostentatiously silly words he’d been saying. Runes around the platform began to glow, and Sandra spun as he said, “It’s done! Should only take a few moments to-”

“Brace yourself!” Sandra shouted, calling up an umbral dagger and readying for a fight. “Something might be coming through that door!”

The whole party reacted for a fight, despite being largely unarmed. They whirled, and with a flash of magic, the world around them changed. Everything outside the door vanished, replaced with a swirling bit of color. Over the course of seconds, that color took shape, until it was clearly recognizable as…

The same room that they were already in. A perfect mirror copy, except without four startled adventurers standing in it.

Sandra breathed a sigh of relief.

“What is it?” Hadrian asked, walking up beside her.

“I think…” Sandra said, “It’s an interplanar gate. We’re looking at another dimension that’s bound to this place, and that ritual opens and closes the door.”

“Are you sure?”

“Only way to find out is to go through and close the door,” Sandra said. “If the doorway shows us another dimension, we’ll know I’m right.”

The party glanced at each other tentatively, braced themselves with the knowledge that they weren’t alone, and walked through the passageway.

Again, Sandra felt the quality of the air shift. Hadrian, quick on his stilettoed feet, hurried over to the other platform, and shut off the spell.

Sandra’s prediction had been right. When the magic ended, the mirror image of the chamber vanished in the doorway, and was replaced by another world.

For a moment, the party was awestruck. Hadrian shuffled forward, eyes wide, and the rest of them just stared.

The sky was a deep crimson-purple, broken up by pale pink clouds that drifted past. Nothing grew, but that wasn’t what struck Sandra. They were on the top of a tower, or possibly floating high up in the air, but either way she had an unobstructed view of a city below, and it… was…

Infinite.

Sandra wanted to think of words like ‘Gargantuan’ and ‘Colossal’, but that didn’t cut it. The city stretched into the horizon, and it was all built purposefully, with symmetrical roads and endless, complicated patterns to the layout.

This was no city built by any nation Sandra had ever heard of. All she could think was that, no matter how great her problems seemed, the extent of reality was far greater. Gods, planes, and dimensions had a far greater scope than any mortal could truly comprehend, and this was a humbling reminder of that fact.

“Any idea where we are?” Quinn asked.

“Somewhere dangerous, I’d expect,” Sandra said, shaking her head and regaining her composure. “We’ll need to be careful, watch where we’re going. The people in this city might not be friendly. They might not even be people for all I know. The ledger will be somewhere, but it’s so… big…”

“It could take a lifetime to search this place and we still wouldn’t be close,” Tarja said, stepping up along Sandra to look out at the city with her.

Sandra didn’t respond directly, but she agreed with the sentiment. “Our only option is to start looking. I don’t understand why the portal would just drop us here, but we need to start looking, and-”

“Found it!” Hadrian called.

Sandra blinked, glancing at him. “Where?”

He pointed at a sign just outside the large gate entrance. Sandra had to step out and look at it, but once she did she saw that it was a pair of maps - one of the local area, one of the tower they stood on. A red dot was marked, “YOU ARE HERE”, and other numbers and symbols dotted the whole thing. To the side, there was a legend.

“It’s a complicated map, but it looks like tomes and ledgers are all located…” Hadrian pointed with a finger, poking a specific spot on the map of the area. “Here, in this building.”

Sandra walked up and squinted at the map, then looked out at the city below them. The tower they were on was a massive spiraling thing that would take ages to walk down or up, and squinting down, she thought she could tell the building they were looking for apart from the others around it.

“So we need to get down, get the book, and then just get back up here,” she said. “Fine. Slow, but not hard.”

“The legend here also, uh,” Hadrian paused, squinting at words that Sandra couldn’t read. “Says that each area marked with an X, Skull, or pitted triangle, is some kind of test or challenge? Or a contest? Getting down the tower is proof that we, basically, deserve to be here and can take what we please, within reason, I think.”

“What, exactly, does it say? Are there details about the challenges?”

Hadrian paused, skimming it again. “I’m gonna be honest… this is some really funky dialect. It’s kind of like Auran, but only kind of, and I think it’s written in a rhyming meter, and there’s some weird metaphor going on... This one bit is either about a three headed dragon, or maybe it’s a poisonous bunch of herbs…”

“So we’ve got some ambiguous challenges and lateral thinking to win our prize,” Sandra said.

“Yup.”

She cracked her knuckles. “Let’s do this.”

…

“Is that all the switches?” Sandra asked, looking around. They’d found six, spaced out throughout the room, meaning it took the whole party, plus Hadrian and Sandra both casting Mage Hand to get the last two.

They weren’t entirely sure what the switches would do, but they were at a dead end and this room was practically screaming ‘puzzle’. Thirty minutes of exploring and riddle solving had revealed six switches.

“We’ve looked everywhere and done our best,” Tarja said. “It’s all of them.”

“Throw them on the count of three,” Sandra said. “One, two, thr- WOAH!”

She yelped as the floor dropped out from beneath them, dropping the whole party down into an endless pit.

Well, it wasn’t endless. She couldn’t see the bottom, but she knew there would be a bottom to it. A flash of magic filled her senses a moment later, and the party’s fall speed reduced significantly, to no faster than falling from a short height. That didn’t stop her from flailing in an oh-shit-I’m-falling panic, but a part of her realized she wasn’t about to die from the impact.

A second later she landed on the ground, bottom first, squelching slightly.

“Is everyone okay?” Sandra asked.

Quinn had landed in a heap of his lacey armor a few feet away; his armor-dress had billowed up around him in the fall and he had to extricate himself with a little work. Tarja was on her back, unhurt but blinking in surprise at the sudden fall.

Hadrian, somehow, managed to land on his feet. He was getting good at walking in heels, apparently.

“Where are we?” Quinn asked, looking around. It was dark. That wasn’t really a problem, everyone in the party could see in the dark, but it meant that the space around them was all black and white, sharp, colorless contrasts denoting shapes within sixty feet or so.

Sandra had her knife out in an instant, ready to fight. This felt like an arena pit, and she was ready for an ambush.

No ambush came.

She looked around a little more. There were four tunnels, one at each corner. The walls above the tunnels were marked with dithered dots in a strange pattern that Sandra couldn’t comprehend.

“We need to go down one of the tunnels,” Hadrian guessed. “Four options, but if I had to guess, three probably don’t lead anywhere good, and… Ah. There we go.”

Water was leaking into the room. Slowly, but surely, filling up the space they were standing in. Sandra was still sitting on the ground when it got to her and it soaked the back of her pants and into her diaper, replacing the warm wetness with a cold sogginess.

She got to her feet. “So we’ve got to pick one, and we don’t have a lot of time. Is there anything distinguishing them?”

“Those dots look familiar,” Quinn shrugged. “Maybe something there?”

“We could split up, go down each tunnel for a little while, and then come back,” Hadrian suggested, splashing over to examine where the water was streaming in; a tiny series of holes around the base of the walls. “If I can figure out the rate of flow, then I can determine how long we would have to search.”

“No good,” Sandra said. “What if there’s a trap? Someone could get pinned and hurt, and we wouldn’t know what had happened to them. If one of us got stuck, we’d all have to go down that way to save them, and we’d drown before we could get back and go down the right tunnel.”

“So it’s a one in four guess, then,” Hadrian said. “If we halve the search time, then we’d have enough time to double back twice, and so if one person got stuck. It’s not perfect, but-”

“No,” Sandra repeated. “Not all of us can fight, or even run. The risks of splitting up are just too high.”

Hadrian looked past her, at Tarja, who was standing in the middle of the room looking uncertain. “I can- Sandra, I can explore one of the tunnels safely. Don’t ignore a good plan on my account.”

“Tarja, stop,” Sandra said. “This isn’t about you.”

“I can run! I just-”

“You can, he can’t!” Sandra snapped, jabbing her finger at Hadrian. “Running in heels, with ankle deep water? Stop thinking about yourself.”

“I-” Tarja looked away. “I’m sorry.”

“We will try and think this through,” Sandra continued, looking back to Hadrian. “If we run out of time, we’ll pick a tunnel and pray.”

“I think those dots are a clue,” Hadrian said, “But I can’t understand them. They all look the same to me.”

Sandra looked down. The water was already three inches high, it was rising fast. Taking a soggy step closer, she said, “Can anyone see any light? Or feel air moving down these tunnels? I’m not noticing anything.”

“I… no,” Hadrian said, half ignoring her as he bounced his own ideas around. “Maybe it’s some language I don’t know, but what language uses dots?”

“I got an idea,” Quinn said. “Does someone have a light?”

“What about… If we created a loud enough noise, we could listen to the echoes, see if there was any sort of difference…”

“A code, maybe. But I don’t see enough distinction in the dithering to-”

“Hey!” Quinn shouted. “Light! Does someone have one?”

Sandra and Hadrian both snapped out of their brainstorming and looked at him. Hadrian nodded. “Yeah, sure. Come on, buddy, out you come!”

His Ioun Wyrd familiar clambered out of his bag. Normally the little guy liked to hide away from people, but at Hadrian’s nudging he could be more sociable, and when he came out, the glowing stone on his back cast light onto the whole cave. It wasn’t a night-and-day difference, but it was enough to make out color.

“Oh,” Hadrian said.

“Yeah,” Sandra agreed. “Good idea.”

Quinn beamed. “It’s like the test they made me do back when I signed up for the army. Y’know, when I was still a kid. Thought those dots looked familiar...”

The dots above each tunnel were colored, such that an easily readable line of text could be made out in each. In black and white, it was random, but with color, they were obvious signposts.

“Let’s see… Death, ‘The Pit’, ‘Escape’, and ‘Death’ again,” Hadrian read aloud. “I say we go with escape.”

Sandra nodded. “Good plan.”

…

“Oh god my feet hurt,” Quinn groaned.

“You’re telling me,” Hadrian replied. “I’ve got aches in leg muscles I didn’t even know I had.”

“We can take a break,” Sandra said. “Have some food, figure out what’s next.”

They’d been walking up and down stairs for hours, navigating a puzzle maze. Each staircase had two turns, and in order to know which was the correct way to go, a riddle had to be answered. Get it right, they were one staircase closer to their goal. Get it wrong, and they were dumped right back at the start.

At the very least, whoever had built this tower had been considerate enough to leave a couple benches out to rest on. Plus, a bonus, they’d been rewarded with weapons - simple weapons, neither magical nor even masterwork, but weapons. Tarja had a bow, Quinn had a greatsword, Sandra had a dagger, and Hadrian had a crossbow.

Sandra sat down on it, noting that her diaper had self-cleaned recently and was comfortably dry and even smelled rather nice, giving off hints of perfumed powder.

Which meant that the smell was coming from someone else.

Hadrian noticed her wrinkled nose and shrugged sheepishly. “Sorry…”

“No worries,” she said. “It happens.”

Still, she didn’t mind that he sashayed over to the far bench before digging into his pack for a snack. Quinn was sitting on the ground, stretching out his legs, his shoes off, massaging his aching soles.

Tarja sat down next to Sandra. “We got through there alright.”

“You had several good answers,” Sandra said, going through her pack and taking out some elven bread.

“Yeah…” Tarja shifted, uncomfortably. Her hands were shaking, but that was just because of the curse she’d been hiding.

I should forgive her, Sandra thought.

Tarja sat next to her, not eating, not saying anything, just waiting for Sandra to make the first move.

Sandra kept quiet and ate her food.

…

They, finally, made it to the bottom of the tower.

It hadn’t been the most dangerous or deadly series of encounters Sandra had ever faced, but it was possibly the most grueling. She wanted to take a shower and get a long, long sleep.

But, they’d made it to the ledger. The library containing all the documents was only a few blocks away from the base, and there was even an elevator waiting to take them back up to the portal once they were done.

“Just find the book,” Sandra said, as they trudged into the most extensive repository of knowledge she’d ever seen. It was a massive library, and apparently an abandoned one at that. Thousands of ancient books all there for the taking.

Even Hadrian was too tired to care much. He just checked a cabinet by the entrance containing a directory, then walked over to get the book.

“This it?” he asked, holding it up.

‘Dranngvit’s Ledger’ was written on the cover. Easy peasy.

“Let’s take it and go,” Sandra said. “There’s an inn bed with my name on it.”

He nodded, and the four of them left the library.

Rumble rumble-

Sandra felt the ground shake. She stopped.

“Hadrian,” she asked. “How confident are you of your translation of that map up there?”

He hesitated. “Uh. Well like I said, I don’t really know it that well, and there was some guesswork-”

“When you said we could take whatever we wanted once we got down here, how much guesswork went into that?”

“Um…” He bit his lip. “Run?”

“Run.”

The four of them ran. Hadrian could only go so fast with his heels, and Tarja was stumbling horribly as she tried to run. Quinn paused for a moment, snatching a potion from his bag and chugging it. Charged with magic, he scooped up the scrawny wizard under one arm, the stumbling Tarja under the other, and then ran full tilt towards the elevator.

Sandra made it first and threw open the gate. It wasn’t an enclosed ride, just a big basket with cables on all four corners. As she ran in and turned to beckon Quinn forward, she saw the creatures coming up behind him.

Half a dozen strange, geometric forms with arms and legs were running after Quinn. Or, more likely, they were running after Hadrian, who was still clutching the ledger in both arms. He was carrying the ledger, Quinn was carrying him, so they wanted Quinn.

He jumped into the elevator car, falling with his companions into a heap, and Sandra slammed the lever to start rising. Three of the whatever-they-weres got on before it could rise out of reach, dangling from the edge of the rail with triangular finger-like appendages.

And there were more. A lot more.

And it looked like some of them could fly.

“Hadrian!” Sandra called. “Tell me you’ve got some magic missiles prepared.”

He swallowed. “A few…”

She summoned her dagger and kicked at the figures climbing on board, knocking one off and stabbing another. Quinn knocked out the third, and Hadrian started blasting the flying ones who got close with various bolts of magic.

Hey, I can do that too, Sandra considered, preparing a couple Magic Missile bolts of her own. She wasn’t a true wizard, but she dabbled enough to throw power around occasionally.

The two of them just didn’t have enough firepower for all the targets coming in. Even with Hadrian firing the occasional poorly-aimed crossbow bolt, the flying creatures were too numerous, and the elevator wasn’t fast enough.

Tarja stood, her hands shaking, and took out her bow. Her hands were shaking, but she concentrated for a moment, blushed, and then looked as stable as Sandra had ever seen her.

Raising her bow, she loosed a shot and hit perfectly. She did it again, and again. She was shooting as well as she could, as though no curse was slowing her down.

Sandra made note of this and kept fighting. Tarja couldn’t do all the work.

It wasn’t a hard fight, exactly. The creatures were numerous, but mostly went down in one hit, so while it took constant attention and a flurry of attacks of all stripes, they weren’t exactly fighting an army of dragons.

The elevator sped up, faster and faster, launching them towards the top of the tower. Targets came in and were deflected, or if they landed they got to meet Quinn’s new sword.

In less than two minutes of tense combat, they made the journey up where it had taken a full day to go down. Sandra grabbed the book from Hadrian and jumped off the elevator before it could even stop and started charging towards the giant gate containing the portal between realms. She paused long enough to ensure that her party was following, and-

Tarja overtook her, snatched the book out of Sandra’s hands, and ran even faster towards the gate, luring the monsters away from the rest of the party and, most importantly, Hadrian. Quinn carried their wizard through the gate, getting him up to the portal so he could do his thing, then ran back to take up a spot by Sandra’s side, blocking the path between the gate and Tarja.

They just had to buy Hadrian a little time. Tarja loosed arrows until she ran out, Quinn slammed his sword through anyone who got close, and Sandra used a pair of umbral daggers with surgical precision. When the creatures died, they simply vanished, so Sandra felt little guilt about tearing them apart in droves. They were constructs, not people.

“Almost done!” Hadrian shouted.

Sandra looked back to nod in confirmation. It was stupid, but she was tired. Looking away cost her a precious second of reaction time, and she nearly didn’t notice the critical blow that was coming right for her head.

“Look out!” Tarja yelled, lunging from ten feet away and tackling Sandra to the ground, knocking her out of the way of the attack with a split second to spare. As they hit the ground, the world blinked, and suddenly they were back in the plane they came from.

Tarja was laying on top of Sandra, covering her body in a defensive posture, but there were no more enemies. Sandra blinked and raised an eyebrow as she felt dense, warm padding beneath Tarja’s clothing.

Blushing, Tarja explained, “I tried to tell you, but… yeah. The Calistrians told me. The curse goes away for a little while if I, um… wet a diaper.”

“Noted,” Sandra said. She pushed Tarja off, rolled to the side, and got to her feet. The book was on the ground, dropped in the fighting, so she picked it up and dusted it off. “We got the book. Let’s go get some sleep. Good work, everyone.”

Tarja blinked, getting to her feet. “Sandra, wait!”

Fine. Might as well do this now. She wheeled on Tarja. “What?”

“I- I’m sorry. I apologize for lying to you. I was wrong, and I hurt you, and I’m sorry.”

Sandra balled a fist, but nodded. She wasn’t ready for the ‘F’ word yet, but she said, “I accept your apology.”

“But… How do I make it right?”

“You can’t.” Sandra wiped her eyes. They were wet, and her heart was pounding. She could tell she was losing control, just from speaking to Tarja for a few moments.

“Then-”

“You can’t,” Sandra repeated, harsher.

She started to storm off, putting space between her and the ranger.

Tarja ran to catch up. She could still run for a little while longer, before the curse affecting her motor skills kicked back in. “I just… it feels like-”

“NO!” Sandra yelled. She turned on Tarja. Her face felt hot. “Tarja, the last thing I want right now is to give a shit how you feel. If you really care about how I’m feeling right now, if you aren’t just trying to make yourself more comfortable, then you will stop talking right now and only speak to me when it is necessary to do your job.”

Tarja stood there, stunned, tears rushing to her eyes.

Good, Sandra thought, and then she felt disgusted with herself for thinking it. “I… I want to trust you again, Tarja. But I can’t. Not right now.”

The changeling opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. “When?”

Sandra didn’t answer.

What she needed was space. She needed room to breathe, room to calm down, and she wouldn’t get that while she was around Tarja.

She walked away.