"Hoo. Yes and no." She takes a cookie. "Don't want to get too soft, is all. I wonder if we can magic up a bath once we have our secret teleportation base..."

"We have unlimited water and a sorceress who can throw fireballs. Shouldn't be too difficult. But if we can find a sanctum where the plumbing still works, that would be even better."

"Grab it." Ame gestures at the Supporter Backpack. "I think you've still got more raw strength than me. Though I think I'm stronger now than you were when we met."

"S'not technically unlimited. Theo did some spells and some math and said we can fill bathtubs but not flood a whole building, but I forget his exact numbers."

She spends a minute stretching and cooling down as they talk, then grabs the backpack with a grunt. "Not that heavy. Maybe I should get a new reading done."

Ame leads the way down into the sanctum.

"Yeah, me too. I got mine right before we went into the Letersoot dungeon and it was probably out of date even before we fought the crocodile boss."

She's done some minor clearing-away of the path. There's less random carpet of rubble and leaves, where it was particularly annoying.

"We're very weird and advancing very fast. It's valuable to know just how much of what you can do, and having those numbers would be good for impressing people looking for advantages, and some parties and even adventurer companies obsess over that kind of thing very diligently, but at some point you're spending more effort on analysis than you are benefiting."

"Yeah, I can see how that could happen."

"There are professional party composition and skill development consultants," she mentions offhand as they approach the inner sanctum.

"I'm back," Ame announces as they enter. "I would've been back an hour ago but I ran into that boy from the Guild and did a sexy sidequest. Turns out I kinda, inspired him to quit his job?"

Ame shrugs.

"But I brought back fresh cookies! Want some?"

He senses a story there but it is nnnnot one he is interested in, so.

He also remains silent on the matter of cookies.

"Well I hope you had fun. And yessss, cookies! Deliciousness to break up the dreary."

"We've got everything we need to set up a base but the kitchen sink," Ame idioms, because the literal is also true. "Hopefully we can find that pre-installed though."

Ame gives Elizabeth two of the cookies, then goes and holds one out in front of Theodore's face with a mild smile such that he might be lured by the aroma.

Sure, cookie, whatever. He grimaces and offers his other hand too. "Ugh. Heal?"

Ame gives his hand a squeeze and heals him.

She looks around.

"Alright, I'm going to get started on translating the twist-directory."

"Miss Elizabeth told me about your monstrosity of a multicast magic missile. I'm interested in seeing it, if only to wonder at the absurdity." Despite the harsh words, his tone is fairly neutral.

"Also, to keep us on the same page*, I half-remembered something for cleansing dark magic users but I really don't want to experiment without a reference and neither does Theo here, reasonably enough."

*"sharing status sheets"

"Yeah," Ame agrees.

To Theodore, "C'mere. I'll cast it and you can poke at it while I work."

Ame heads over to grab the blank books from the pack, then the Witch's books, then finds a place to sit down. She casts Magic Missilepod, attaching it to her left arm so Theo can poke while she writes.

Liz goes to take a nap. Abyssia sets about organizing all the stuff and cooking a lunch.

Theo pokes at the spell very attentively, muttering things (including 'why?' and 'how?' and 'like THAT?') once in a while. He's more interested in the spell than her body.

After a while he takes out a large hand-sized cube of copper and red gemstones and chants at it an incantation that amounts to "Destroy the instructions remembered here without leaving any traces," then starts working on what looks like his own version of the same concept in a slightly ratty notebook.

Him inventing his own version is pretty interesting too, but Ame wants to be really sure she doesn't translate anything wrong and also avoids making any mistakes in the copying, and her interest in Theodore's work wanes as she meticulously writes out all seven-hundred and twelve entries.

Once she's got four copies, and checked them over twice, she starts a new page at the front just for the important numbers. Here. The mountain. The coast Abyssia was interested in.

"Alright," Ame announces, closing the four small books and holding them up. "Here we go. Four copies of the translated twist-directory. Any other suggestions for noteworthy places yet?"

"Sixty-seven's fairly close to my College. Though it might just happen to be in the notoriously monster-infested province of Tarland, I can't quite tell from this map. If you want sorcery, there'd be - fuss - but we could make it happen."

"This one is in the mountains north of Liscor. It's a city famous for fantastic-quality mercenaries. I don't have any particular reason to go there, I just recognize it."

"Noted. So. Somebody start lunch. Once we're all fed, I figure we can do this by either visiting every twist-node in order, systematically eliminating the ones unusable as bases, or by picking numbers based on location and whim, and stopping as soon as we find the first intact sanctum. Further exploration later. Probably we should do the first and then the second on the list of intact sanctums, assuming all the sanctums are abandoned and undefended. If we can't assume that, probably we shouldn't go to all of them in order, though."

"I have lunch handled. And the whispers are saying 'the lost and confused linger in their misplacement', and given that the Witch of Spacetime summoned monsters I think that's a 'be careful'. I can ask for more specific advice before we actually go anywhere."

"Thanks, Bys. Speaking of the whispers and their whispering, have they said anything about what happens if we go straight for Saroshem as we are now? Even if we're not planning to go straight there either way, it'd be good to have some idea."

"...Pretty sure they're saying to wait, but I can't understand why. Sometimes it's not advice for me, just noise, but- Honestly I need to go help them soon. That's most of the point. I've been slacking on that."

"Then let's make that our first stop," Ame suggests. "Where do they need us to go?"