Sophia shrugged, then stepped forward. She might as well try the easy way; she'd certainly feel dumb if it worked and she didn't try. Failing would be useful, too, if she was able to see how it knew she was there.

The moment Sophia touched the handle, she heard a soft click. She followed Sweetfire's instructions and pushed lightly. The door swung partly open silently, which left her with an issue: did she pretend to be surprised or did she pretend to have solved it that quickly?

Sweetfire hadn't even seen yet; he'd turned away from the door to face Dav.

Dav, however, was watching the door. He solved her conundrum with a question. "Managed to open it already? That was fast."

Sophia shrugged. "There's a trick to it."

There, that was truthful and yet didn't give anything away. It would be easy enough to explain later if they decided to introduce Sweetfire to Tiwaz; Sophia still wasn't entirely certain if that was a great idea or a terrible one. It was something she should talk to the others about when Sweetfire wasn't present.

Sweetfire spun in place to stare at the open door. He paused for a long moment as if he wasn't sure what to say before settling on, "I didn't expect you to open it that quickly."

"Neither did I," Sophia admitted. "Should I go in or do you want to lead?"

Sweetwater shrugged, then waved Sophia forward.

Sophia pushed the door the rest of the way open, stepped into the short hallway, then stopped in surprise at what she saw where the hallway opened up into a larger room. The walls to the left and right were covered in charts and diagrams, like a series of giant monitors, while the back wall held fancy alcoves or possibly doors separated by glowing magical banners; one of the alcoves had a bin of glowing mana crystals, but the others were empty. Consoles that looked a lot like ancient computers or maybe something from a science fiction show stood in the corners of the room, separated by stairs.

A large circular artifact dangled from the ceiling. Its flat surface glowed with magic, like a portal, but it was no portal Sophia had ever seen; there was no place on the other side, simply a ring of mana that seemed to flow out and down. A series of broken crystals floated in the mana, but all they did was bob up and down; they didn't move.

The floor held more circles, but they weren't suspended away from the surface; instead, they seemed to be formed simply of mana. Runes of some sort glowed near the circles. They looked familiar, somehow, but Sophia couldn't place them.

She didn't spend much time trying, because they weren't the only things in the large room. Five obviously magical devices turned towards her as she stepped into the room. Three floated in the air; their giant swirling eyes made Sophia think of flies even though nothing else about them was even remotely fly-like. They were more like oddly-shaped balls with crystals stuck onto them around the sides and back so that they could fly. They were relatively small; while the central ball was far larger than one of Sweetfire's Happy Fun Balls, it was still smaller than a soccer ball.

The same could not be said of the other two mobile devices. They didn't fly; instead, they walked on a trio of legs that looked immensely weird, almost like they were crouching all the time. To make things even odder, they had only two arms, each of which had a three-pronged pincer to grab things which could apparently also be coated in mana to interact with or maybe even create the patterns on the floor. That was where their hands were when she stepped into the room, at least, in the circle of swirling mana that surrounded each of them.

It was somehow reassuring that their bodies didn't look at all like people. Instead, they looked like huge spikes of manacrystal wearing a metal suit with metal arms and legs. That was less weird than the three leg/two arm combination, to Sophia's mind. Something like that had to be a design feature. Maybe they couldn't reliably stand on only two legs so they added a third for balance?

Sophia blinked, then looked back at Sweetfire. His mouth was open as he stared into the room. "I take it this isn't normally what it looks like in here?"

"No," Sweetfire agreed. He moved forward but carefully avoided stepping on the mana-infused glowing spots on the floor. "I guess this is why it was locked?"

Sophia shrugged, then moved forward. She also avoided stepping on the glowing bits of floor, but it wasn't out of worry about danger; they weren't that strong. If she'd bypassed a lock to enter, she might have worried about it either being dangerous or about there being a security system she'd missed, but she hadn't. She'd entered as an authorized maintenance worker, and this area was clearly undergoing maintenance. She simply avoided the marks because she didn't want to mess them up. "Let's see if we can figure out what's going on here. Alley, how much do you know about this place?"

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Sweetfire shook his head then pointed at the wall to the left. The monitor he indicated held an image that had to be a map, along with a legend written in familiar letters. Sophia was pretty sure they were ancient Kestii, like the ones she'd seen in Othala's ruin. "That's what we need; it has the instructions we use to maintain the Garden."

"That can't be all that's here." Sophia glanced around. That was only one display of eight. It was a large display, but there had to be useful information elsewhere. There might even be a way to contact Tiwaz.

Sweetfire shrugged. "I'm sure there is; the Garden's complex. I'd like to know more, but it's not worth the risk. I can investigate the Windows, because we know how to fix them if I break something. If we cripple the Garden, we die. It's that simple."

"No setting changes, got it," Sophia answered. "I wonder if the machines can talk?"

Sweetfire gave Sophia a look, as if he didn't quite believe what he heard.

Sophia shrugged impudently. She didn't need him to believe that machines could talk; she just needed to know how to use the facility they stood in. She wasn't as carefree as her words indicated, but she did think that Sweetfire was being overcautious. The place to start was probably the map Sweetfire's people used.

No, wait. That was a terrible place to start; it was the one thing they really needed.

Sophia shook her head and headed towards the closest machine; it should have been one of the two large crystalline spikes, but one of the flyers flew closer before she got there. "Can you talk?"

It seemed to shimmy in the air, then spun around and flew directly to the back of the room, where the open container of crystals sat. It spun back around to face her, then repeated the shimmy.

That had to mean that no, it didn't talk, at least not in words. The action was clear enough; it wanted her to follow it. Sophia shrugged and set off after it.

"We'll be careful," Dav told Sweetfire behind Sophia, "But I know I'm curious, and I don't think you could get Sophia or Xin'ri to leave easily either. Why don't you explain what you know and consider it the cost of Sophia opening the door?"

"If I knew anything, I'd tell you." Sweetfire sounded annoyed. "But I don't and the Garden is too important to risk. I'd say we should leave, but then the door might lock again and I'd have to bring Sophia back down here and … we have to stay. But don't touch anything! Especially not the constructs! I've never seen anything like them before so they must be why the place was locked. Let them work."

Sophia shook her head but didn't say anything. She wanted to contact Tiwaz; the facility-mind would know what was safe to touch and what wouldn't better than Sweetfire did. That didn't seem to be what the crystal-studded fly-drone wanted, though. What it wanted wasn't obvious, even after she reached the container of crystals.

They were stacked loosely inside a box that seemed to be made of metal like the metal of the consoles scattered around the room; it even had a set of lit buttons. It clearly wasn't a console, however, because it wasn't fixed to the floor at all. Sophia looked down at the crystals, then up at the drone. "What am I supposed to do with these?"

It bobbed up and down. When Sophia didn't move, it dropped down and touched one of the crystals, then rose back to its normal height.

"You want me to touch one? Or pick it up?" Sophia wasn't entirely certain what it was telling her to do. The drone didn't seem to have a good way to choose, either, so Sophia cautiously touched one of the crystals. They were full of mana, but it was a stable sort of mana that reminded her strongly of the mana storage cubes in Tiwaz's Creation Chamber. It wasn't quite the same, but it was similarly structured. If anything, this seemed like the naturally occurring version of something the storage cubes imitated and perhaps improved on.

Nothing happened for a long moment; the drone didn't even move. That had to mean that it wanted her to pick up the crystal. Sophia shrugged to herself, then pulled it out of the box.

The crystal came free easily. A soft ringing sound seemed to come from it, rather than the scraping noise Sophia expected. A sharper clink came from other crystals shifting once the one she pulled was gone.

The drone bobbed in the air again, then zipped over to the mana currents under the swirling ring of magic. That pulled Sophia's attention to the crystals that floated in the air. "Oh! You want me to lift the crystals into the air there?"

She could do that. It was pretty simple, even if it was annoying to have to avoid the marks on the floor as she moved back and forth. When she released a crystal below the ring of mana, it floated where she left it, then slowly drifted towards the center. As more and more crystals accumulated in the ring, it began to look almost like it was trying to fit a puzzle together. There were spaces between each of the crystals, but they formed a loose cylinder that was fairly evenly spaced.

It took longer than she expected, since she couldn't just move the entire box at once; it was too heavy for her. That was probably why the fly-drone had her helping, too; while it seemed to be able to levitate some of the smaller crystals, it never moved any of the big ones, and the big ones were on top when Sophia started. They must have already moved all of the small ones they could reach. It made her wonder why the larger golems didn't help. The three fly-drones all helped, but Sophia was pretty sure they weren't supposed to do it on their own.

Sophia lifted yet another crystal into place, glad the task was almost done; there were only two more large crystals left to move.

Or so she thought.

This time, when she released the crystal, it didn't just float slowly inwards; it shot straight towards a gap in the cylinder, while the other crystals broke apart and then reformed, shuffled quickly into a new shape. It was still circular in cross section, but it was wide at the top and narrow at the bottom, like a funnel. Unlike a funnel, though, the very bottom was a solid surface. The crystals glowed for a moment, then shattered in unison, turning from the glowing soft blue of stored magic into multicolored fire.

Sophia glanced towards the three flying drones. They weren't in the air above the box where she expected them. She glanced around the room and didn't see them at all.

It took her longer than it probably should have to look down and realize that all three of them had landed in the nearly emptied metal box.

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