Kazue was quite happy with the way the young trio was f up. One of her biggest s with regard to taking Fuyuko on as a ward was making sure that she had friends who were peers, and this seemed like a great opportunity to set her up with a couple of them.

  Of course, nothing was guaranteed. Derek retty easygoing, but Shizoku was often kind of prickly. Though Kazue was ied in a shift of Derek's personality; he seemed a little more fident and he hadn't bee flustered whe Fuyuko. Kazue suspected that he had figured out what Shizoku to, though she wondered what had clued him in, he seemed rather fused by her previously.

  Now that they had started on the dungeon, she had plenty of time to finish anizihoughts about where she wao go from here. There were a couple of things that she o che with Mordecai and Moriko about, but they both proved fairly tent to let her go on with her pns.

  And really, she didn't have a lot she o do at the moment. Most of their mana was tied up in backfilling their territory to elimihe geap that their growth had caused. Mordecai had done some more work in measuring the mana demands and he wasn't terribly happy about a predi that his work created; now that they had breached whatever it was that normally pensated for imperfect shapes they were going to have to make every new zo without any 'is' and generally make it smoother, and they were going to eventually o be more spherical. The only thing keeping it from eating at their ability to form rewards and respawn their inhabitants was that those two pools were tightly segregated.

  This would expin why enviroal dungeons teo be spherical, and the two of them had itted themselves to being a hybrid design, so they had to pay the extra cost of more territory.

  But with no other sort of growth to pn for, Kazue o eain herself somehow, and even her illusionary pseudo-avatars only helped so much. She'd been able to tie the illusions to her mental state thhly, but they didn't provide actual feedbad still took up her focus in order to know what was going on. Which could be embarrassing if she actally left one on while focused on the area of a different ptform. Not that she would ever do anything like that of course.

  Whehree teens cleared the theater zone and had been gifted their prizes, Kazue had the director let them know to head down to the rest area of the library zone, where one of Kazue's ptforms waited. The trio showed a little bit of uainty but went along with the flow, even if their prizes had left them feeling suspicious.

  Ohey were at the rest zone and had approached the ptform, Kazue activated her illusion and beamed at them. "Good job so far, but what sort of challenge do you think you are really up for? Because I think you three should try and push all the way through on this path."

  "Which certainly expins our 'rewards'," Shizoku said dryly, "Survival and basic crafting tools don't really fit for a theater level."

  "Exactly! Now, I know that for the most part, Derek and Fuyuko have been training their bat skills, but Fuyuko also managed a good portion of her trip alone, and Shizoku's patron is a forest spirit, so I imagine you deal with the wilderness pretty easily. In addition, if you are here then Derek's obtained a certain amount of trol over his elemental abilities. This should give him the ce to practice to overe new challenges. So, my proposal is that I drop off all your old gear here, to go with your current and future prizes. I'll have to also get the okay for an indefiravel time; getting through might take a lot of work, possibly even a couple of weeks. So first, are the three of you up for this?"

  She gave them time to discuss the idea, and Fuyuko had a question "So, ta be sure, while I'm doin' this, I don't have ta do the rest of the schoolin' you guys had in mind?"

  Of course that's what she was worried about. Kazue gri the girl, "No worries there at all. This sort of thing is important too. Additionally, a tractor 't get the same sort of iion with their dungeon's challenges, so doing this before you bee one is better for you and for us."

  Derek was more uain, "Um, I don't think my parents are expeg me to take that long, and the group we traveled with might be done before that."

  Kazue nodded, "We were thinking of sending a messeo your parents, and if they need any help while yohey could cover your work. It might be a good experience for a couple of our inhabitants." It was also teically more dangerous than anything they might do in the dungeon; if there was an act when they were outside of the dungeon's territory, they wouldn't be ing back. Their souls would join the normal flow of life ah instead of resting in the dungeon's core until they were respawned. But it wasn't a risk any rger than every normal mortal faced iside world.

  "Additionally, and we want to be clear that this is a separate offer, we were thinking of you three a sort of exge program. You would spend a month here, w and training alongside Fuyuko, and then she spends the month with one of you. There's some about the long-term effects of a young tractor spending all their time in their dungeon's territory, so this should offset that issue for her. Naturally, this requires getting permission from Derek's parents and from Shizoku's grandmother first, but I think she will be fih some extra training for Shizo."

  Shizoku gred at Kazue's illusion. "Really?"

  "It's such a cute niame," Kazue said with a grin, "but I guess it takes someone special for you to let them call you that." Someone like Derek, apparently. But that part was best left unsaid. "Sht now, you guys should settle in a yourselves some food. It's not quite up to the fare you had topside, but we have enough for you to cook something satisfying. And maybe if you are lucky, you find your way to one of the cafes in the library tomorrow."

  She sent some bunkin to collect the items, partially to maintain the charade that the wagons weren't already iheir territory, and had them delivered by the time the trio had made their dihey were not the first and not eve to arrive that evening, but the dungeon had been expanding the space as o aodate the influx of people. Sure, there were some days when it was just empty, but those were being rarer.

  With how busy the dungeon had bee, they were also taking advantage of Kazue's three-se library on some days, and the teens were going to fae of the useful aspects of that flexibility. Kazue made sure that they ended up in the exhibits se. This had been the hardest to flesh out, but now they had plenty of puzzles to solve. The other two ses would have beeively easy for the book-smart witch to power through, the exhibits se was going to require all three of them.

  It had beore of an iive museum as Kazue had developed her initial cept, filled with dispys ranging from historical value to pieces of art to educational pieagic, alchemy, or teology.

  The trick was that some of these dispys and iive pieces were wrong or broken, with enough information to both notice that there was an error and to then figure out how things were supposed to be. Given the plexities involved, Kazue waived the normal limitation of needing to not talk to get the best rewards. Besides, that only really fit the normal library areas anyway, exhibits and dispys were something you were supposed to talk about.

  The first one was alchemy-based, though with a new formu and some exotigredients to ehat Shizoku couldn't just spot the problem and fix it immediately. The first part of the puzzle was that several ingredients were not in the correct locations. But as an educational dispy, there was of course a description of eagredient, not just a name.

  Following the instrus blindly would have resulted in a foul-smellihat would have spattered everywhere and been hard to off but was ultimately harmless. Shizoku's experiend suspicious nature helped her notice that one of the ingredients was wrong, and they worked together from there. Derek's elemental abilities were great at teasing out subtle properties of minerals while Fuyuko's keen nose t at distinguishing all the subtle sts involved with the herbs that Shizoku was not familiar with. The result of this particur formu was several balls of strongly amon-fvored, alchemically infused chewing gum, along with a copy of the formu.

  The sharp st and fvor could be used to ward of minor noxious sts and even reduce the effects of airboroxin for up to an hour, but it had a sed use as well. If one carefully blew a rge bubble until it popped, that thinning stretch would set off another rea that released a small e of fire in front of the one blowing the bubble, though it got weaker the longer you'd been chewing the gum and would no longer work about the time that the fvor faded. Not something they would give a normal young teen, but these three were also training for bat.

  After they had cimed their prize, the trio had some expl and reading to do before they discovered their sed puzzle: A crystal and mineral dispy that had been 'vandalized', plete with a bunkin pying the part of an overwhelmed and distraught curator. Some stones had been put in the wrong location, while others were simply missing. Derek was the best at finding the missing pieces, but there was a lot of area to explore. After that, they had to identify the correct stohe twist was that some of the stones were dyed or heat treated to enhaheir colors or mask their fws, while others were samples of fakes. They had to bee amateur geologists and gemologists to use the avaible tools and refereo get all the samples into the correct dispys.

  As rewards for their hard efforts, they were given some small, semi-precious gems along with a pair of spectacles that could help decipher written nguages you didn't know, a hand-held magnifying gss ented to enhas magnification, and a less powerful moyle eyepiece useful for examining small items while handling them.

  A little while after they'd pleted that puzzle, Fuyuko stumbled onto the 'gift shop' without realizing that she'd been following clues when she'd been trag down a story thread through multiple dispys. But they were challengers right now, so nothing was free here aside from water from a drinking fountain. Taking the water with you required buying a fsk.

  Of course, Kazue liked to provide quality products. They were a little more expensive, but there were some fsks avaible that had minor entments to provide a light fvor to any water they held, while also being able to hold more water or other drinks than they should be able to.

  Shizoku sighed and paid up; they did have some water fsks in their gear, but none of them were ented and it was a useful item to have, and the spiced packets of jerky and nuts were a fu, along with a few bags of dy.

  The third dispy was a clockwork tellurion, or at least, the dispy for it. The pieces for it were scattered along with the remains of several crates that had been used for shipping the parts, along with the parts for some ued maes. There were assembly instrus, though those had been mixed up as well. Fuyuko took the lead on this particur mess, even if it ainfully obvious that she was shaking some rust off long unused and only partially remembered skills.

  Assembling this moook the rest of the day. It didn't help that some of the shinier pieces were being pyed with by some faeries, which had not been part of Kazue's design. The trio were exhausted by the time it was done, but were rewarded with some very nice pocket watches. The silver-pted timepieces were built to be both sturdy and precise and were ented on top of their quality materials and designs.

  Of course, there wasn't a proper pce to rest in the middle of the zone, so the three of them found their way back to the gift shop and were able to talk their way into being allowed to camp out in the ba of the store for the night.

  Zagaroth