Castle Planner's Journal: 1000 Years

     She was hoping to meet up with her brother and Gaius, who were usually having breakfast at this time. Lisha needed to ask the Castle Planner for a favour. Surely he would have the maps of the sewers that would save her the troublesome trip of dealing with the fearsome Slorgs that lived down there. As she opened the castle door to head across the lawn of the courtyard to the great hall, she was greeted by a rainy downpour.

     “Oh, fie.” She muttered. Not wanting to get soaked, she was stuck with having to go the long way, through the narrow and circuitous halls of the castle. Not wanting to be late for getting a good seat at the breakfast table, she picked up her pace.

     By the time she had gotten there, the rainy day seemed to have drawn many pets to the warmth and comfort of the Great Hall. She scanned the crowd for the familiar royal blue fur of her brother. It also helped that he was usually among the tallest in the room, but her own size made it hard to see over the crowd. It thankfully didn't take long for her to spot him munching away, and she weaved through the crowd to get to the other side.

     “Good morning Lisha!” Jeran greeted her. “Sit! Have some porridge." He offered her a spare that he had grabbed, but wasn't as hungry as he thought.

     ”Hello brother. How are you this morning? Hello Gaius!” Lisha was glad to see the Castle Planner in exactly the spot she expected, by Jeran’s side.

     “Doing well. Dreading the mud this rain will cause.” Jeran lamented.

     “I always dread the rain. The water levels in the cisterns under the castle are about to reach their limit, and of course the Slorg slime has made the problem worse.” Gaius shuddered at the thought of trying to design yet another system to prevent clogging.

     “Actually... I had a question about the sewers, Gaius”. Lisha knew she could hook Gaius in with an inquiry.

      “What sort of question?” He was curious.

      “Well, I need a map with the names of the gates in sewers. It’s to do with what I told you about that I found in the library the other day!”

      “Oh yes. Jeran mentioned that you had managed to solve the first puzzle in that strange cipher yesterday! I certainly have those maps, and would be totally fine with you borrowing them, but I’m fairly sure those structures down were not named or even labeled.” Gaius said as he paused his eating.

     “Oh? Well, hopefully the maps will at least shed some light on the question.” Lisha had hoped that Gaius would have had easy answers.

     “I’ll probably send some squires down there later today for clog duty if the rain keeps up.” Jeran let Lisha know. “In case you need to head down there yourself.” He gave her a wink, knowing full well that she had no intentions of doing that.

     “You know I have to be in the library all day.” Lisha came up with an excuse for why she wouldn't be going down there, filling her mouth with some porridge.

     “Oh, well, I will be stuck in the new gallery site all day. I will send someone to help you find the maps in the collection. Normally you would have no trouble finding them in the collection, but I recently rearranged it while setting up the plans for this project.” Gaius thought back to his recent activities.

     “Okay, thanks for the heads up. I don't want to accidentally interrupt your work!” Lisha made sure to scold him for bad library practices.

     Lisha finished up her breakfast to head to work at the library. It didn't take long into her shift to see a familiar face pop into the doorway.

     “Hey Lisha!” The Green Ogrin greeted her. It was Wolcott. “Gaius sent me to the library to help you find that map?”

     “Oh! Of course it would be you. Glad you got a little break to help me out again!” Lisha was excited to start the next leg of the adventure with a familiar face.

     “Surely. It beats having to lug blocks of stone around.” Wolcott jokingly flexed his stick-like arms, before approaching Gaius’s desk in the back of the library. “He mentioned that it should be around here.” He said as he pulled out a drawer near the bottom.

     Inside of the desk were stacks of papers, piles of books, and folders to keep everything at least nominally organised. It looked a little chaotic, but even Wolcott could understand the organisation. It just took a little time to learn. He found the binder that had maps, and pulled it out of the drawer, careful not to disturb the other piles.

     He took the binder to the table, and then opened it up. Lisha helped him sort through the stacks of maps, each had been layered on top of the other. As Wolcott lifted a map, Lisha would gingerly layer it in a pile out of the way. The maps varied in age, but Lisha could spot some dates on some that were over 200 years old.

     “Here’s one!” Wolcott produced a map of the complicated maze of underground passages under the castle. It was definitely the sewers. “There could be a few more, so I will look for those. Ah yes. Looks like Gaius did this one only 10 years ago.“ Wolcott put the two maps to the side for them to study.

     “It says copy on it. Is there an original?” Lisha had noticed the word in large letters next to the title and signature of the map.

     “Oh, That means that the original map was starting to fall apart too much to keep being used. We make exact recreations of tattered maps so that they can keep being used. Gaius has been having me do a lot of that lately, and it’s exhausting. So many little lines, and you can't miss any of them!” Wolcott could feel the eye strain coming back.

     “So this new puzzle... Name the farthest gate seen by the clogged water cleared by hard workers. I suppose we need the gate that’s deepest into the sewers.” Lisha started tracing her finger through the maze laid out before her.

     “Oh, I think it's this one. It’s the furthest away.” Wolcott immediately pointed to one of the exits for the fluids to enter the river. “With the entrance over here, this is the furthest.”

     Lisha pondered as she looked at the maze-like map. She worried it couldn't be that simple. “What if it means that it's the gate with the furthest path.” She started comparing the paths on the map. “Let me get some string.” She said, disappearing to her librarian’s desk.

     “Well, That’s certainly an interpretation, but we also have to consider what the sewers looked like 1000 years ago. I think Gaius, and a number of Castle Architects, have moved walls and created corridors over the years in an attempt to fix the clogging issue. None of their attempts ever work naturally, but it sure makes it hard to know what pathway would have been the furthest that long ago...” Wolcott thought out loud while Lisha fished through her junk drawer.

     Returning with the straightedge, she started measuring by laying out loops and noodles of string along the map. As much as she wanted to pin or tape the string down to make it easier to wrangle, she knew better than to put holes in the map.

     Both Lisha’s measurements, and Wolcott’s insight yielded a terrible result: There were simply too many ways to interpret the poem to point to a single gate. “This one is the farthest from the entrance, this one is the farthest to walk to in the present day, this one was likely the farthest to get to in the castle’s past, and this gate is the furthest from the river. Sorry Lisha, but I think there are too many ways to look at this. We can’t solve this from the library.” Wolcott was resigned to a lack of answers.

      “Aw, shucks. Well, my brother did mention that some poor squires were going to be going down there soon. Maybe I could ask them to investigate while they are at work.”

      “You don’t want to go?” The Ogrin asked.

      “No thank you! I don’t like getting my shoes all soggy on the best of days, but to soak them in sewage? Nope. No. Not happening!” She said, drafting a crude copy of the sewer map on a separate sheet of parchment, marking a few of their key spots. “I’m going to see if I can get a couple of squires to help me out with this one!”

      Lisha finished up the last lines on her map, gave it a quick double check, and dashed out of the library to find her brother.

      “Good Luck!” Wolcott shouted as she departed, while he started to carefully and meticulously put the map back where it belonged.

      The gleeful grin of Sir Tormund flashed as he greeted the pair of squires that had just entered the wet training grounds for their duties. They all greeted each other in their usual pleasantries, but Tormund was gleefully hiding something from the class of squires.

      “Good afternoon Squires. Now that the rain has cleared, it’s time to assign duties for the day!”

      “Oh no. He’s got that smile on his face.” Morris rolled his eyes.

      Tor pretended to not hear the commentary. “I will read out names, and your task. We have a special one today.”

      “I think I can guess what it is...” Boris said, having flashbacks to the last time he was picked.

      “Squire Boris... You are in the stables today. Help Sir Pinroker with tending to the Alabriss.”

      Boris exhaled a sigh of relief.

      “Squire Fallkirk! You are going to help Chamberlain Lazlo with verifying records.” Tor smiled as the squire pouted at one of the most boring tasks.

     “Man, Lazlo is such a stick in the mud...” She whined.

     “Don’t let him hear that... Squire Cavall, You will be helping Gaius repaint the limewash on the castle exterior. Meet him by the garden entrance in thirty minutes. He mentioned he was running a bit behind.”

     The Cybunny simply nodded, wondering how the effects of getting paint on his fur would affect his day.

     A panicked look raced across Morris’s face. He was the only one without a task. He looked at Tor as he grinned. Morris swore he saw a flash of schadenfreude in Tormund’s eyes.

     “Ah. I remember this feeling. I received this task all the time from Master Torak, and now I bestow it upon you, Morris. Clog duty!” Tor laughed.

     Morris groaned in resignation as his fate was confirmed.

     “But remember. I said it was special!” Tor produced a sheet of paper with a crude map drawn on it. “I will be coming with you! As we have been given a quest from Lisha.”

     The young Quiggle’s eye lit back up. “A quest?!” He was cautiously optimistic.

     “Yep! There’s a map to follow, and we will have to try going to some of the deeper sections of the sewer to look for something long lost...” Tor looked at the crude map and wasn't sure how it came into play.

     “That’s not so bad! I’ll take a quest any day!” He excitedly said, the other squires looking a little jealous.

     “Don’t forget, there’s still clogs for you to take care of.” Tor reminded Morris, who quickly deflated again.

     The squires dispersed towards their tasks, while Morris followed behind Tor. They headed first to the armoury to get into their protective equipment, and select suitable weapons and tools to remove the clogs, and fight off any rogue Slorgs.

     “Ready?” Tor was strangely excited to return to the sewers.

     “Yeah...” Morris said double checking the last buckle on his armour to make sure he was truly prepared.

     “Then below we go!” Tor headed to the dungeons where the main entrance to the sewer was located.

     As Morris climbed down the ladder and into the sewer proper, his nose scrunched up at the stale air. Thankfully the sewers were not full of waste, but there were certainly still a few natural things decaying down here in the still waters. He had smelled this before, but did his best to not let it get to him. To keep himself going, he thought of the future. Maybe he would be the one to assign clog duty to some other squire. He started to understand Tor’s tendency to give a great big grin when assigning the task.

     “Keep your head up. The Slorgs down here lately have been rather vicious.” Tor drew his sword in preparation as he crept forward through the tunnels. “At least, the last squire reported having more trouble than usual.”

     “Why would the Slorgs be so upset down here?” Morris wondered, stroking the beginnings of his first failed attempt to grow a beard. “The Slorgs in the gardens are so happy, and carefree.” Morris had his slingshot at the ready.

     “It’s as if they are entirely different Petpets. Ooh! There’s one!” Tor pointed out a Slorg, half camouflaged in the debris.

     Morris quickly lined up his shot, and expertly sniped the Slorg with his slingshot. As it sank into the muck, he readied another shot.

     Tormund sheathed his sword, and held up his small torch to illuminate not just the way forward, but also the map. He squinted at the lines, trying to align the walls in front of him with the hasty ink lines on the paper. The brick lined tunnels were a hodgepodge of various different ages of architecture, all vaguely leading in the same area. Some notes Lisha had left on the map suggested an efficient route.

     “Let’s go this way.” Tor pointed.

     “Give me a sec, I see a clog over in the corner that needs attention.” Morris stepped up to handle the situation without prompting. He waded through the waters to an amalgamation of sticks, leaves, and Slorg slime. He started hacking away at the blockage with his sword, and leveraging a metal pole they had grabbed from the store room for the more stubborn chunks of detritus.

     Once the waters flowed with vigour once more, the young Quiggle caught up with Tormund. The Yellow Lupe had been examining a large semicircular exit of the sewers. A simple, but functional metal grate blocked access to everything that wasn’t water from exiting the sewers. This was one of the markers that Lisha had left on the map. As Morris approached, Tor filled him in on the situation.

     “Lisha gave me this map of various sewer thresholds to investigate. She is looking for information about them that might not be obvious. Says there's some sort of puzzle afoot. We should record anything unusual about these parts of the sewer, even if it’s minor.”

     “So you are saying we don't know what we are looking for?” The Quiggle pointed out.

     “Not in the slightest. But that won't stop us!”

     “So, we will know it when we see it...” Morris confirmed as he squinted at the very plain archway. “But nothing here looks out of place. From what I recall, it looks exactly the same as the others down here.”

     “Then on to the next one!” Tor started to lead the way.

     After a few minutes of trudging through sludge, Morris spoke up.

     “So why did you pick me to do this?” Morris wondered out loud as he used the metal pole to dislodge a clog beginning to form in the stream of water.

     “Because you are about to complete your time as a squire. It’s been a long time and you’ve grown plenty, and I suppose it’s a way of rewarding that maturity.” Tor explained as he supervised the Quiggle’s labour.

     “Hah! Mature?” Morris sheaved the pry bar. “Sorry I can’t help but laugh... I guess I don't know how else to react but humour. I don't think anyone has described me as ‘mature’ before.”

     “People said that about me once.” Tor admitted.

     “I have heard stories!” The Quiggle rejoined him as they continued down the damp corridors.

     “From who?” Tor laughed with Morris as they walked. This moment of distraction was the window of opportunity that the Slorg hiding in the corner needed. It coughed up a sticky slime ball and spit it at Tor with incredible speed. Tor had been balancing on the sewer’s edge, and this startling ball of goop was enough to knock him off balance.

     Falling off the ledge to the lower portions of the sewers with a thick sounding splash, Tor vanished from Morris’s sight. Morris raced to the edge to see if his superior was alright, scooping up a plank of wood to use as an impromptu shield against the assailant. The Slorg however had other plans, spitting another chunk of slime at the Quiggle, hoping to knock him down too. Morris was able to deflect it out of the way with a squelch using his board. As the Slorg began to regurgitate more slime to use, Morris took his window of opportunity to let loose a fast flying rock from his slingshot.

     Now that the threat was neutralised, he gingerly leaned over the edge to look for Tormund. He knew that the ledge was not a fatal height, but could still seriously injure even the toughest of pets. “Are you okay?”

     Tor let out a groaning sigh. “Yeah. My ego is a little bruised.” He said, wiping a bit of slime that had splashed onto the side of his face. “Times like these that I am glad that this is mostly storm and river water, rather than the alternative.” Tor laid still in the muck as he watched Morris climb down the ladder.

     “No spine injury?”

     “No, thankfully I landed in water.”

     Morris offered a hand to pick him up, and get Tor cleaned up as best as possible.

     “Well, on the bright side, there’s another exit to check over here. I was planning on doing it last, but now that I fell off course, we will just have to improvise.” Tor said, pulling out the now damp map.

     “I think this might be the one we are looking for.” Morris said, staring at the ornate details on the gate. The metalwork was ornate, and finely worked by a blacksmith to be full of loops and curls, while the brickwork surrounding it was equally carved with masonry adorned with leaves. Far beyond the needs of a sewer grate.

     Morris nor Tor understood the insignias that they saw, but had they known, they were sure that this was what Lisha was looking for.

     “Look! There’s text across the top. I think this is what Lisha was most interested in. It says STITCH!” Tor pointed to some wrought iron work that clearly had the letters worked into it.

     “Stitch? Like sewing?” Morris questioned.

     “Sure enough. I don't know why they would put that on a sewer gate though.”

     Morris shrugged. “Maybe it was the last name of whoever made the gate? Or sponsored it”

     Tormond nodded. “Probably. Rich folk love putting their family crest on things they have built. There's some heraldic imagery worked into part of the gate.” He said, writing down their results on their map, and tucked it away for safekeeping.

     “Quest complete!” Morris announced, echoing memories of his favourite game.

     “Half complete!” Tor corrected him

     “Huh?”

     “There’s still some clogs to break up!” Tor giggled.

     An hour later, they finally emerged back out of the sewers, and immediately went to the river to wash themselves of the filth. Morris was much faster to dry off, but Tor had to stay outside while his sopping wet fur dripped dry in the sun. He knew that the castle maintainers would be upset if he left a dripping trail of water for other Pets to slip on. Tor gave Morris the map with the answer to turn in to Lisha to complete the quest.

     Morris hopped up the stairs of the castle a few steps at a time reaching the floor of the library, and raced down the hallways, only slowing to walk in the halls when a knight or guard could see him. He burst into the library, “STITCH!” he announced loudly and proudly.

     But Lisha was not in the library, Morris had instead interrupted the reading of a gaggle of finely dressed pets who had been doing research that afternoon. He sheepishly dodged the sharp stares, harrumphs, and icy glares of the upper class.

     “What was that ruckus?” Lisha asked as she came into the library right after Morris.

     Covering his face with his Lupe-ear cowl to hide from his victims, he joined Lisha deeper in the library near her desk. “We found the thing you were looking for!” He whispered as loud as he could.

     “Oh!” Lisha gently gasped. “I knew you could do it!” She was pleased to get results without having to get wet.

     “The gate had the word ‘stitch’ on it prominently. What does that mean?”

     “It’s the password for the next clue!” she said, writing down the answer.

     “I thought it was just the name of some rich person for a research project.” Morris was intrigued as Lisha started writing out letters under a jumbled mess, and then started doing math.

     “Here we go. The message is revealing itself!” She pointed out to Morris who was rapt watching her reveal letter by letter the message.

     WOVEN IN THE TAPESTRY OF CULTURE IS RESILIENCE AND OUR CHIVALROUS CODE

     “What a nice motivational message.” Morris said, satisfied.

     “It sure is, but what does it mean?”

     “It means that Meridell is a place of tough but gentle knights, obviously.” Morris jokingly said proudly. He knew that there was obviously more to this message as well.

     Lisha gave him a glare and a smile. “No you goof. Well, we might have to ask around. No point in trying to do this alone.” she resolved.

     “Agreed. I can ask around too!” Morris said, writing the message down on the map as exactly it appeared.

To be continued…