Balrim and Myrin’s secret weapon was a man whose tent looked like it had been wallpapered. Pins and hooks held huge sheets of paper to the canvas walls of the tent. It took Kaldalis a moment to process what, exactly, he was looking at. Splashes of color shot through with thick black lines. If he didn’t know what they were here for, it might have taken him several minutes to recognize what he was looking at.

“A cartographer, huh?” Kaldalis said, looking more closely at the nearest sheet of paper as soon as he realized it was a topographical map.

The cartographer in question was a Vathon with deep blue skin and horns that looked more like a bull than a ram, reaching out wide from the sides of his head with the points angled straight upwards. His body shape was closer to Kaldalis’s than to other Vathon; while he had the hourglass figure that even Kaldalis hadn’t been able to customize out, there was a masculine body shape around the chest and shoulders. It made Kaldalis suspect that the man was a player character, not an NPC.

“Martok,” the Vathon said, offering Kaldalis his hand.

“Kaldalis,” he said, accepting the handshake. “Pleased to meet you.”

“So how do you know Balrim and Myrin?” Martok asked, turning back to the map he had pinned to the back wall of the tent. He had a paintbrush and was meticulously drawing more black topographical lines in over the colorful splotches of terrain.

“We ran the first dungeon together,” Kaldalis said, looking over to Balrim and Myrin, whose attention seemed to be taken up by watching Martok work. “And we’ve kinda been each others’ go-to when we need to fill a role.”

“Hm.” Martok grunted as he finished the careful line he was drawing. “So, what do you want?”

“Kal has a project,” Balrim said, looking around for a moment before settling on one of the maps hanging on the left wall. “And he needs us to get one of these for Nos Meles.”

The map Balrim gestured to was labeled Mallia. It took Kaldalis a moment to remember that it was the name of the area around Cotanaku - though the big blotch on the coast labeled “Cotanaku” helped him get there.

While many of the other maps on the walls were very rough, this one looked like a finished product. It was carefully marked with dozens of landmarks and locations.

Kaldalis was surprised at how thorough it was. The coloration looked like a scaled-down transcription of the minimap, with the markers showing basically every location he’d ever seen. It included the ruins he’d found with Dalgaard, and even the lake beyond it where he’d encountered Ara. There were signs and locations he had been unaware of, too. The river that came from that lake fed into an estuary along the coast that Kaldalis had never seen. On the other side of the map, there were three other ruins sites, one of them only a dozen yards off from the path they’d taken back to town from the dungeon exit.

“Wow,” Kaldalis said, leaning in closer to the map. “This is amazing work.”

“It’s what I do,” Martok said with a shrug. “It was just a bit of a hobby IRL, but here the built-in map mechanics are fucking garbage, and I won’t stand for it. Hence: cartographer.”

Kaldalis nodded. He could understand that passion. Martok basically felt about cartography the same way he did about fishing. It was a passion that he finally had the ability to really lean into in this world.

Unlike fishing, however, mapmaking was something that produced fantastically useful results.

“Alright, so.” Kaldalis turned his attention to the other maps, which were more obviously of Nos Meles. Most of them were topographical, and he assumed Martok was using them to get the literal lay of the land before he started on a more complete affair. “We’re trying to find the dungeon entrance. We know the setup here.” Kaldalis went back to the map of Mallia, pointing to the entrance to the dungeon, which was clearly marked. “If we can find the exits,” he continued, his finger trailing towards the exit, and the side exit of that first dungeon, “then maybe we can find the entrance here by a similar sort of pattern.”

“Hm.” Martok grunted and looked at the map of Mallia. His gaze flitted back and forth between that map and the other maps around the room. His brow furrowed for a long moment, but then he began to nod. “It’s crazy,” he said at last. “But crazy enough to work.”

Kaldalis held up a hand to hold back the overwhelming enthusiasm. “I’m not sure how I’d extrapolate from the exits. But I figure we can at least get a region to search instead of needing to comb the whole island.”

“No, I get that already,” Martok said, turning towards a chest at the foot of his cot, digging through the rolled-up papers within. “You don’t have to explain it. I think I have the rosetta stone to this plan, though.”

After a moment’s search, he produced another map - labeled The Sunken Ruins of Aruna - and held it up next to the map of Mallia. Kaldalis saw that it was an incredibly thorough map of the interior of the dungeon. It covered the entire maze between the first boss and the underground city, each path clearly labeled with what mob types there were, and with little blocks of text describing each boss’s abilities, and which one would carry forward to the end boss.

“While I know videogame logic is a thing,” Martok continued, “the exits on the dungeon do correspond to their physical positions outside of it. If we can find the two exits for this dungeon - even if we can’t backtrack - we can confidently say that they will match up to the corresponding locations on the dungeon.”

“What’s the scale here?” Myrin asked, looking between the two maps.

Martok didn’t answer, just pointed to the bottom left corner of both maps, where a scale was already depicted. He handed her the map of the dungeon and then started to examine the map he had been working on when they’d come in.

Myrin held the maps up next to each other and started muttering to herself. It sounded like she was rattling off numbers.

Kaldalis’s attention followed Martok, though, as he started to pour over a map of the coast on the east side of Panbu.

“This here,” Martok said. He pointed to a little splash of blue amid the green above the beach. “There’s a pool here surprisingly far up off the beach. I mapped this area at high tide, so it was full of water, but this could be your side exit, if Monsoon likes making the walk of shame a swim of shame.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Kaldalis said, running his hand across his close-cropped hair. “But without exploring it, I don’t know if we want to jump right to that conclusion. It might just be a fun water feature.”

“It’s the right direction, though,” Martok said, turning to the next map, and then flipping it up, showing another map beneath it. “This is up beyond that, farther east.”

Martok pointed to a specific spot, where the topographical lines all converged so close together, it looked like one thick streak. Kaldalis was familiar enough with reading maps to know that it meant that spot was an extremely steep hill or cliff.

“You think this is the exit.” It wasn’t a question.

“You’re not wrong, it is a stretch,” Martok said, even though Kaldalis hadn’t actually expressed his doubt. “But I’ve drawn a lot of topographic lines out here in Nos Meles. This is the only place so far where they look like this.”

“It doesn’t mean there’s not another spot,” Kaldalis pointed out with a frown.

“Yeah, but until we find one, we can work with this,” Martok said, giving Kaldalis a glare. “We can make some assumptions to start.” He turned to another map, taking it off the wall and holding it up next to the map with the pool he believed to be the exit, where the coloration and topography lines lined up, turning it into a larger continuous map. “I think we might be looking at this region here.”

“This is all freehand,” Myrin pointed out, looking up from the map in her hands. “I assume you’re taking this seriously enough to have some measurable margin for error.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Martok said, gesturing dismissively. “My margin is maybe twenty feet. Considering the scale of this world, I think getting it that close is pretty good.” He held out his hand towards Myrin. “Hand me that map and we’ll try and find an actual location.”

“We should round up the error margin,” Myrin said, handing him the map. “Call it fifty feet. Maybe a hundred even.”

“Sure, sure,” Martok said, examining the map and then gesturing at a point in the northeast corner of the white-blossom forest. “A hundred-foot area won’t be too hard to search around this.”

“A hundred-foot area?” Myrin scoffed, planting her hands on her hips. “We’re working from two maps here. Maybe more like three.” She gestured back at the map of Mallia.

“Okay, okay, a two-hundred foot area,” Martok allowed, tracing a space that size around the point he’d indicated.

“Jesus Christ,” Myrin slapped a hand to her forehead. “You don’t just add error margins. And these maps are all at different scales, and… Actually, just scoot over.” She swatted him away, muttering numbers to herself. She held her hand up to the scale in the bottom left corner, and carefully adjusted the spread of her fingers before putting one to the spot Martok had indicated.

“What the fuck is going on?” Kaldalis asked, staring at Myrin as though he’d never seen her before.

“Don’t worry about it,” Balrim said with a laugh, clapping him on the shoulder. “You get used to it.”

“Used to what?”

Balrim shot him a toothy smirk. “Oh, she’s got more STEM degrees than I can count. It turns out if you want to be a perfect memelord, you just gotta be a professional student for a decade.”

“Only eight, and most of them overlapped in course load a lot,” Myrin said in a singsong voice, before shifting her attention back to Martok for a more serious tone. “This is about the area we need to be looking at. And keep in mind, this area is the size of our starting point. It could easily be within four hundred feet of whatever point is the actual starting point.”

“That’s a huge fucking area,” Martok said, grabbing a piece of chalk and carefully marking the circle Myrin had indicated - presumably so that he could wipe it off later. “Obnoxiously huge, when you consider how dense the forest is here.”

“Then I guess we should get hunting,” Myrin said with a big grin.