Go get the other key

Blythe leads you by the hand through the dark halls of the labyrinth. The route she takes is far more convoluted than your left wall strategy, and were you the one leading, you’re sure you’d be lost by now. You doubt even her elven eyes can see anything in this place, but she seems to have a pretty confident idea of where she’s going. Not to mention, she was able to find you from just the sound of a monster roaring in the distance. Her memory and attention to detail is incredible, you think. I wonder if that’s an elf thing, or if it’s just her. After about five minutes of being blindly pulled along, you see a light up ahead.

The place that Blythe leads you to looks identical to the alcove you found Lia in. You approach the plinth in the center, a glow emitting from its surface and filling the space around it with dim light. Just like the one you saw before, the plinth is decorated with glowing letters displaying several sentences of a logic problem. The one before was pattern-based, but this one takes a different approach. It’s a math problem, using tables of statistics that you’re meant to use to deduce an indirectly related value. One look at Blythe tells you she’s totally lost. I’m sure they don’t teach this kind of stuff in a fantasy world like this, you think. Lucky for us, I’m from Earth. We Earthlings are drilled on this shit for years. You get to work, using heavily rounded values to make the mental math easier. After a couple of minutes, you’ve eliminated two of the four possible answers.

“It’s between these two,” you say. Before you start trying to redo the math with less aggressive rounding, you remember that you have a much easier method at your disposal. I should have thought of this in the first place, you think as you pull out your smartphone and turn it on. Fortunately, it seems whatever is preventing the use of magic here doesn’t do anything to your phone. I could have been using the flashlight on this thing this whole time, damn it. As you pull up the calculator app, Blythe squeezes right up next to you to watch. The way her eyes are glued to your phone screen is adorable, and her wonder only increases as you start punching in numbers and operations. “Aaaand, there,” you say as the final answer comes up on screen. “The answer is the first choice. I don’t know how to select it, though, so would you do the honors?” You look at Blythe, but she’s just staring, dumbfounded, at the mathematical wizardry she just witnessed on your phone screen. As an afterthought, you realize that while the numbering system of this world works the same as the one you’re used to, the symbols for the numbers themselves are different. Does Blythe even realize what she’s looking at? These wouldn’t even look like numbers to her. “Remember how I told you this thing could do complex math problems?” you say, trying to ease her out of her awestruck state. “These characters are what my people use for numbers. Sorry if it all seems strange to you.”

The blonde elf looks to you and shakes her head. “I do not mind being exposed to these things. It is actually rather exciting to learn more about you like this.” Blythe then turns to the plinth to enter in the answer. You can’t help but grin at the visible disappointment on her face when she sees you power down your phone again. It’s at thirty percent battery now, so every use is going to have to count. Still, you would love to indulge her innocent curiosity if you could. Some day I should let her play with it, you think. Maybe if I learn a lightning spell I could charge it? I might just fry it with something like that, though. After placing the device back into your pocket, you look up to see that Blythe has somehow removed the section of the plinth with the correct answer on it. She now holds it in her hand as a thin sheet of stone, but it quickly becomes engulfed in a golden light, as does the plinth it came from. As you watch, the plinth melts into a pool of radiant, golden goo, which then rises up and coalesces over the plate in Blythe’s hand. For a second it looks like the stuff is going to totally engulf Blythe as it bubbles out into a massive orb around her arm, but she looks at you confidently. She’s done this once already, you remind yourself. She’ll be alright. Shrinking from a sphere that engulfed nearly her entire arm, the tiny sun-like entity becomes the size of a softball around her hand. Finally, the golden goop condenses into the shape of a key, held firmly in Blythe’s fingers, and then the brilliant light that was filling the room quickly fades to black.

You feel her hand touch your arm, and then travel down to your hand. “Come with me,” she says. “I will take us to the door now. Perhaps Ms. Lia will already be there.” She laces her fingers into yours, and gently pulls you from the room.