"—wait, you knew what was going on?"

"I did mention I had studied magic."

"All right. I apologize for not asking sooner. What… hint… were you going to give?"

"There are multiple confounding factors to your experiment. You're trying admirably to test them, but if you're not careful you'll test nothing. In brief: you know that you can contact Roy Greenhilt, who claims to be dead, and is certainly not here. You know that you can contact Angurdha, who is alive and twenty feet away. You know that you can contact your Lord Shojo, who is definitely dead - or, well, as definitely as can be determined - and is certainly not here; however, he does not produce a clear feedback result. We need to test individual variables. Is this cave lead-lined, such that outgoing messages must be directed to a different plane or fail? Unlikely, but testable; Send to a few relatively nearby surfacers who are almost certainly still alive, of whom I can provide a few, and one who is certainly dead of nothing related to your Xykon - perhaps my wife. Is your home simply too far to reach, somehow? Send to this Durkon character your Roy mentioned. He is approximately the only person we can confirm is alive. So on, so forth, et cetera."

Oh.

That's… actually helpful and thoughtful. And exceeds Miko's subconscious expectation that Finnean was bringing this up to throw her ignorance in her face. She takes a breath and weighs the options.

"All right. If you have a preferred wording for the surface-dwellers and your wife, I can try that. In the meantime…"

Durkon, despite his taste in companions, has always been trustworthy enough.

"Send to Durkon Thundershield. I'm testing the limits of this spell. Have been unable to contact Sapphire Guard. Greenhilt says he's dead and you'll raise him in the morning."

"I'll come up with wordings during the cast." Cast!

Fizzle.

She rummages in her inventory for some scratch paper and makes lists.

Spell failure: every paladin she tried, Thundershield. Spell success: Agurdha, Greenhilt. No feedback from the spell: Shojo. (Although evidently it did work with him? She's not sure what to make of that.)

"Okay, I'm ready to try the others."

The first living person they try is "that obnoxious elf." Finnean sends her an empathic packet of knowing-that-obnoxious-elf; it's tinged only slightly by how much Finnean dislikes him. The message is Relaying Finnean Blacknife. Said I was bound to blade more than I knew. Turned into sword, slept century. Knowledge of this? Please respond regardless.

"I don't actually know his name or I'd have told you. We can try a few configurations, but you sending on my behalf rules out the most possibilities if it works."

She dutifully relays this message! And wonders what exactly Finnean's relationship with the elf is, to be this unfond of him and yet pick him as the first living person to contact. Maybe it's because of elven lifespan?

"What are the possibilities this will rule out?"

"If you are successful, we will know that you do not need to personally know the target, and can instead work from an empathic impression; that we are not blocked by a feature of this cavern, as I had postulated; and that the elf has still not yet induced someone to murder him. Which is not strictly relevant, but has been a matter of personal curiosity."

That last one gets a laugh out of her.

"Well, is he so obnoxious that lasting a century without being stabbed would be unlikely?"

Finnean grunts. "The only thing more infuriating than someone who acts like he knows everything is someone who actually knows everything, but doesn't know enough to shut up about it."

Ding!

The responses so far have taken a minute or two to formulate. Twenty-five words is a significant constraint, and it takes a good deal of thought to make one's point within it.

After ten seconds - the same amount of time it took to actually speak Finnean's message aloud - a reedy voice responds.

Knowledge <truefalse>.* <This happenedn't [counterfactual-conditional-past], mattern't [counterfactual-conditional-present] what said.>† Sending failure five plus percent interplanar, hundred farther. <Xykon win't [prophetic-perfect].>† Call wife anyway. Look forward to meeting Miko.

*Draconic has a fairly rudimentary vocabulary for quantum states, but rudimentary is better than nothing.

†Orcish has a versatile system of negative suffixes.

*†The Storyteller has permanent Tongues.

"You see my point, perhaps."

That has got to be an abuse of the word limit.

"… Yes. All right, translating all that into Common, he—knew that you had a chance of turning into a sword but not that it had happened until you told him. And a variety of things that neither of us actually told him."

"He doesn't usually have quite that much information, but he generally has some amount of knowledge that he has no business whatsoever possessing. I disagree with your assessment of his message to me; it seemed like he was saying 'if it weren't true, I wouldn't have said it'? Or perhaps something more stupid than that. I really don't know why I expected any sensible answer at all."

"…That makes sense, actually, yes."

She's not sure why he needed to take four words to say, what, that he only said things that were true? She's not sure how much stock to put in his prediction that Xykon won't win, though it is somewhat comforting that the first she's heard of the lich here is that.

"Is there anything else that seems relevant to you? Before we, ah, call wife anyway?"

"The failure rate of Sending aside, no. And also, no, we are not calling my wife anyway."

"Why not? It was your suggestion first."

"Yes, it was. But - listen."

He sighs, or at least sounds like it.

"The experiment was over. I don't need emotional distractions right now. He knows that I wouldn't have done it if he hadn't mentioned it. And he knows something that I don't, that makes him say I should. Maybe he thinks it's in my best interest to do it, and if so, he's probably right. But if you let people tell you what to do just because they're right, then people can control you by being right. And some people are always right. And I do not want those people to be able to use me."

Pause. "Except, well. As a sword, I suppose. You needn't worry."

This sounds absolutely ridiculous. Of course you should do what people tell you if they're right.

But, well. One of the more dangerous kinds of person is the one who always seems right. The one who can talk anyone in circles and provide heaps of compelling evidence for why their beliefs are correct and why what they want to do is the best option.

(She thinks, of all things, of the goblin at the watchtower. Xykon's lackey, who liked the sound of his own voice.)

"Very well. She isn't getting any deader, at any rate."

She peeks out of the tent to look at the

Oh, right.

She opens her pack. It had a masterwork shovel; is there any sort of timekeeping device on hand?

There are several hour-candles, one of which it might have been useful to light several hours ago. There is an hourglass likewise. There is some kind of gnomish-looking device that displays something going forward at one second per second, but the format is unfamiliar.

Yeah, that would have been useful. She can do that tomorrow night, if she hasn't already gotten a sense of the little tinkertown thing by then.

Lann said that down here they keep time by gong. This implies someone who keeps time in some other fashion so they can ring this gong correctly.

"I'm going to find someone who knows what time it is," she says conversationally, then leaves her tent once again to do so.

Agurdha's still there!