"Yeah."

"...Someone will notice if we both stay gone."

"...No one but Aiglamene ever sees me anymore, not in years, and I think she gave up trying to catch me skipping training over a month ago," Gideon says. "Maybe she thinks I'm dead, I dunno. You're the only person I've talked to or let see me since - " She raises her hand in a weak gesture at their surroundings.

"...So no one's gonna notice it's both of us gone." Very quietly, staring at the Body without truly seeing her: "No one'd notice if it was just me for the rest of forever."

"I would."

She actually properly looks up at that, and smiles like Ellyn rarely sees. "I'd notice you were gone, too. I noticed you were going."

Huff.

"Then don't stay here."

"Not if you don't want me to," she promises. Then: "C'mon, let's go look at that ward again. I wanna tell it that it's stupid that it reacted to my blood but not yours."

Off. For real this time, after only one more false start.

Once they're across the pool again and back on the outside of the door, the first step will be to put the rock back where it was. ...Gideon will have to do that bit, as it's too heavy for Ellyn to shift.

That's what she's here for. 

Once the rock thunks back into place, the original blood ward spiderwebs back into its original configuration.

" - Hand me the lancet?"

She passes it over.

"...Test one," she says, with an air of solemnity she doesn't quite feel. This should be - formal, though. Special. "My blood, applied by me, with no conscious manipulation of thalergy nor thanergy."

She cuts her thumb, and she presses the still-wet blood to the center of the ward.

The ward starts peeling apart again.

She pushed the rock closed again, then grabs for her notes. "It's my blood - it doesn't even need necromancy, just the blood - but fucking why, that's ridiculous - "

She looks at the ideas she's scrawled so far. None of them sound sane from a security standpoint, though she can test them with stolen blood at least. But, almost helplessly, she looks at Ellyn.

"I don't know."

"She had my hair."

"...Maybe it's just a coincidence."

"...Maybe."

"...We should test other people's blood, too. I can try to get some of Aiglamene's in training? And - we could see if my blood does other stuff. Like, if you can use it to break random wards, that's different from if it only unlocks this one." She is going to reverse engineer this fucker if it's the last thing she does. 

"Mm. Good idea."

"See if old blood works, too, like does it need both my thalergy and thanergy - does it have to be blood, does any living dying cell of mine work, could you directly pull my thalergy and-or thanergy and push it into the ward - "

In a sudden, almost dizzying rush, she wants Ellyn to try those - to pull her apart enough to get at a representative sample of tissues - she knows they need to get back before anyone misses Ellyn, though, they were already down here for way too long this time -

"Gideon. Stop. I'm not doing any of that today."

She stops, closes her mouth, then with a grumble just resolves to scribble her ideas down in her notebook for later. 

"...Whenever you want to, though. To test it more."

"Mm. Later."

"...I'll wait for you to do the other tests, too."