Okay. What's the cautionary note? After that she will move on to the dragon book.

The cautionary note is another emphatic warning about unicorn brain fungus followed by a chapter going point by point in exhaustive detail about why the author thinks it is bad practice to have sex with your humans. The most major consideration against is of course the risk of creating a hybrid, but the author also thinks that it's a bad idea for other reasons, like that it can lead to favoritism and discipline issues, or that it's a failing of these degenerate modern times something something pointed yet impenetrable sociopolitical subtext. Anyway don't do it.

Moving right along: dragon book! This one is written in a less familiar dialect, and some of the phrasings can be hard to puzzle out. Sort of comparable to trying to read Shakespeare unaided. It seems to be describing historical encounters with dragons, but in a weirdly repetitive way, almost like it's presenting several different retellings of the same story in parallel. Consistent among all the accounts is that dragons are huge, powerful, and mad about elves trying to move into the desert. Other than that, details vary, with some perspectives talking about them like they're sneaky trickster spirits while others depict them almost as mindless forces of nature, winged hurricanes that destroy everything in their path.

How... big... are dragons around here.

That's wildly unclear from the vague and contradictory accounts in this book!

Well, Imra didn't laugh at her being a ridiculously midgety dragon or anything. Where is he anyway, this is taking a while.

She has time to puzzle through about another half a chapter's worth of dragon-related legends and rumours before Imra says All right, I'm back! and then walks in the door.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, it took longer than I expected to find the secret plans. I realized as soon as I actually looked at the old wine cellar that I couldn't possibly be the first person to think of digging a hidden room there, and it turns out I'm absolutely right about that, so we're going to have to be a bit careful not to run into the other one. I think we'll do fine, though."

"What's in the other hidden room?"

"The plans didn't say. Could've been a bolthole in case the palace gets overrun, could've been contraband storage, could've been where one of my noble ancestors kept their embarrassing collection of bad poetry..."

"Oh, for some reason I was imagining you discovered another secret room existed and immediately attempted to enter it."

"I might have, but I didn't want to take the time while you were waiting for me! We can look at it together if you like."

"Sounds fun. I read some of the creepy human breeding book while you were gone, how worried should I be about unicorn brain fungus?"

"There hasn't been an outbreak in centuries. I think you're safe."

"Oh good. It seemed to be very much weighing on the author's mind. - Should I be wearing some other sort of clothes for going about the place? I mean, I like my clothes fine but I've been in them longer than usual and don't want to be conspicuous on the way down the stairs."

"Right, yes, I thought of that earlier and then forgot, one moment—"

He looks her over, concentrates, and then hands her a stack of fabric. "I can step out while you get changed. Let me know if anything doesn't fit, I'm usually good at guessing sizes but nobody's perfect."

"Thanks."

How hard is it to figure out these articles of clothing?

Not that hard. There's a shirt-like thing and a pants-like thing and a set of weirdly long undershorts and a pair of slippers. None of it is too small and the things that are big are plausibly intended that way.

Then presently May will emerge in the slippers with her Earth clothes in one hand and her shoes in the other.

Imra is sheepishly holding a large canvas sack. "I forgot your bag's really weird too, I can put an illusion over it if you want or you could just stuff it in here to disguise it."

Stuff stuff. "I should have remembered, they were confused about zippers."

"Believably pretending to be something you're not is really hard, it turns out! Anyway, this way to the wine cellar."

May follows along, sack in hand, looking around only a little nervously for third party inspection.

Third parties definitely notice Imra but don't seem especially curious about who's following him. He leads her along a somewhat circuitous route down through several levels of the castle and into a clean, dry underground storage area full of stacked barrels. Past the barrels, a small unobtrusive door leads to the promised maze: a twisty little passage lined wall-to-wall with wine racks, leading into yet more twisty little passages. The wine racks are fastened to the walls very securely, and seem to be about 60-80% full of bottled wine.

Imra has a quick sketch of the wine cellar's floor plan in his hand by this point and is consulting it as he walks. On paper you can sort of see how someone had a vision for a way to get a cellar room with a really absurd amount of surface area, and wasn't thinking about inconsequential details like how you would ever hope to navigate it afterwards.

"Here," he says, the first time they come to a real live corner that doesn't secretly have more wine cellar behind it. "Let me see..." He squints at a bit of illegible marginalia, then stands up on tiptoe and grabs the protruding end of a wine rack support strut. Pulling on it causes a folding crank handle to slide out, and as he turns the crank, the wine rack to his left goes 'click' and starts slowly receding, taking its whole section of wall with it. "Oof, that's stiff. All right, since you asked, let's see what's in this secret room."

It takes the wine rack and attached wall section a solid minute or so to slide backward and rotate out of the way so they can enter the room. By the end of it, Imra is looking noticeably tired.

The room beyond is small and cramped, and where the wine cellar is lined on all available surfaces with wine racks, this one is lined on all available surfaces with shelves, and the shelves are covered in an assortment of paper—some loose, some folded, some rolled into scrolls. In the middle of the room there is a lamp and a writing desk.

"Uh...?"

He proceeds cautiously into the room, picks up a folded letter with a cracked wax seal, and reads. "'My Dearest, I thought of you today while hunting rabbits...' um. I'm not sure I want to read this out loud, actually."

"Somebody's weird love letter cellar! Gosh."

"Apparently!" He's skimming the rest of the letter. "...ah, I think I've figured out why this person built a love letter cellar. He just mentioned his wife. So... an entire secret cellar behind the obnoxious wine maze, just to hide an affair," he glances around the room, "which I have to imagine was conducted mostly on paper because this is a lot of paper... I guess either conducted mostly on paper or conducted for a really, really long time. Anyway, I was slightly hoping we might be able to repurpose the existing secret room but I don't think there's enough... room... in here... even if we took out all the love letters... and also I think the door might be too heavy for you to move, I was having trouble hauling on that crank and elves are stronger than humans."