Martok grimaced, but obviously intended to say something. Kaldalis let him go through the internal journey he needed to get through to arrive at his statement.

“I’m sure you don’t care,” Martok grumbled at last, “but you don’t have to make a fuss to get out there. I know playing by the book is the antithesis to your very existence, but there is a way.”

Kaldalis wanted to object to being so grossly mischaracterized, but Balrim cut in first.

“What way is there?” the red-scaled Talsar asked. “I thought nobody was going out beyond the guards.”

“Some of us made a reasonable protest,” Martok explained, nodding his head towards Courbois. “The Contender may be out to get us, but he’s not unreasonable, when confronted rationally.”

“I don’t know that I would call the confrontation rational,” Courbois snorted. “But it worked.”

“Adventurers are allowed to explore beyond the borders,” Martok continued, ignoring the interjection, “but only when he can afford to send a priest and some guards as chaperones. He had two at a time for the first few days, but it went back down to one pretty quick.” He gestured southeast, towards the middle of town. “The council is handling the queue. Just sign up with them and you can get out there sometime in the next handful of days. I was out there two days ago. And I’ve got agreements with most of the people on the list ahead of my next trip to feed map data back to me.”

“Can you get us in with one of those groups?” Kaldalis asked. “I mean, if anyone was going our way.”

“None of them were heading for the raid,” Martok said with a dismissive wave. “Everybody is giving the place a wide berth to avoid pissing off The Contender. I might head that way to finish out the region, if there’s not anything else to explore, but…”

“Would you mind taking us on your trip, then?” Kaldalis asked.

Martok fixed Kaldalis with a glare. “Do you need me to say it again? Pat-tern re-cog-ni-tion.” He enunciated each word with patronizing precision. “I know what you’re going to do. You’re going to find the place the rules bend, and shove on that spot until it breaks. Once you’re done, I’ll be shocked if they ever let any of us out again before The Contender is done with his investigation.”

Kaldalis had to admit he was right. Even if he didn’t intend to break the rules, he probably would. If he went out there, whatever chaperone they sent would go way out of their way to wrap the rules around Kaldalis’s wrists like shackles, and put the blame on him when he wriggled free.

“Any advice for where to go when we do get out there?” Kaldalis said, but then he paused and quickly adjusted his wording. “If we get out there?”

“What do you mean?” Martok asked, fixing Kaldalis with that glare again.

“You have the beginnings of a map here,” Kaldalis said, gesturing at the pages on the table. “Any idea where a library might be? Or a school? Or anything else relevant to our needs?”

“Damnit Kal,” Martok snapped, “I’m a cartographer, not an anthropologist.”

Kaldalis had hoped that the joke might have lifted Martok’s spirits, but he stormed back across the room to his desk and went back to work, grumbling all the way.

“I think that’s all we can hope to get here,” Myrin said, nodding her head towards the door. “I think we ought to clear out and give grumpy pants his space.”

“I think you better have,” Martok grumbled, hunching over his maps.

Courbois urged Kaldalis out of the little shack quickly, while Myrin and Balrim set about returning the maps they’d fetched to their proper places. As much as Kaldalis wanted to pry a little more help out of Martok, he was reasonably sure it wasn’t happening without some leverage.

Leverage that he didn’t have.

“So,” Balrim said as the quartet finally left Martok’s home, “are we going to see if we can secure a spot for one of those trips out?”

“I think we all know that isn’t going to happen,” Kaldalis said. He found his own fatalistic grumbling to be a little too close to Martok’s attitude, and so stood up straight and said more clearly: “even if we wanted to do that, it’s not going to work.”

“Oh?” Courbois asked.

“Come on,” Kaldalis said, gesturing in the direction they were walking - towards the town hall. “Jetmorpan is in charge here, right? That guy would cut off his own horns with a dull hacksaw if he thought the sound would irritate me.”

“Evocative imagery,” Myrin said with a wince.

“My best chance for surviving in Kayore is if he doesn’t even know I’m here,” Kaldalis continued. “Going and asking him for something seems doomed to failure.”

“Still,” Courbois said firmly. “It’s the right way to do it. The Zarans are pretty attached to their rules. We can make that work for you. Play by the book, and even Jetmorpan would be able to throw it at you.” She puffed her chest out a little. “Besides, I practically built this city myself. They’ll cut you some slack if I’m with you.”

Kaldalis wanted to point out that he had the same relationship with Panbu’s construction, and the council there hadn’t given him even a sliver of respect for it. But he decided it was better to let her figure it out on her own. If she wanted to call herself the ‘Kaldalis of Kayore,’ she was going to have to take the good and the bad of it.

Despite his misgivings, he allowed her to take the lead and the four of them went to the town hall. As it was later in the afternoon, the line of people waiting for meal chits was gone, and they were able to go right in.

The town hall exterior was much like the one in Cotanaku, but it was very different on the inside. Both were two story stone-and-wood structures, but where the first floor of the Cotanaku town hall was a large meeting room - likely due to the more democratic nature of the town’s founding - this one was a reception area that split into hallways lined with - presumably - offices.

“We’re looking to sign up on the waiting list for an expedition out into the wilderness,” Courbois said as they approached the reception desk. “Who do we need to talk to for that?”

The clerk - a Talsar man with blue-green scales - grunted in response, pointing to the chairs along the far wall. He seemed to be too engrossed in his current task - filing his claws - to engage with them.

“Uh, I guess we wait, then?” Myrin ventured.

The clerk grunted again, visibly rolling his eyes.

The quartet took their seats and waited. The place was dead. No one was going in and out. There was no line or foot traffic. Despite that, they still remained parked for nearly twenty minutes. The clerk went through filing down all of his claws, and then thumped his bare feet up on his desk and filed the claws on his toes. And then after that he fetched a mirror, and started filing the scaled ridges and thorn-like horns on his head. Once he put the mirror and file down, apparently satisfied with his work, he stood up and pointed down the leftmost hall.

“Fourth door on the left,” he said. “Cardoc will see you now.”

Kaldalis found himself wondering if the wait had served any purpose. There had been no indicator of when or where to send them. He found himself brought back to all the waiting he’d had to do in Baimer, and almost started to demand some answers. But Courbois seemed intent to take point on this, and she calmly stood up and headed down the indicated hallway. Kaldalis elected to follow her lead.

The fourth door on the left led into a windowless office. There were three cabinets against the back wall stuffed with documents and an extremely small desk in the middle of the room. It was cramped - and became much more cramped as the four of them jammed in there - and the Vathon woman inside seemed instantly aggravated and uncomfortable by their arrival.

“You’re here for a venture into the outside,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but she looked at them expectantly.

“Yes,” Courbois said, firmly and confidently. “As soon as possible.”

“Alright,” the woman - Cardoc - said, turning to the clutter of scattered notebooks and papers on her desk. “Give me one moment to confirm.”

She eventually found the right notebook, and as she flipped through the pages Kaldalis saw the listed names crossed off - presumably the expeditions that had already completed. After a few pages came the names that weren’t crossed off. The clerk slowed down a bit, looking to confirm that there were no open slots on each page before flipping. Just the same, her eyes and hands were so fast Kaldalis couldn’t pick out any names as she moved. He thought he saw Martok’s name on one page, but he couldn’t be sure.

And she kept flipping pages covered with names.

And more pages covered with names.

And still more pages covered with names.

She stopped suddenly, finally finding an open spot. One line was unoccupied in the middle of a page that was otherwise full. She tapped it for a moment before consulting with a pile of loose papers beside her. To Kaldalis’s frustration, she copied a name into the spot off of those papers and then started flipping again.

More pages flew by under her hands.

Kaldalis had a flash of memory from Baimer. The clerk at the dungeon flipping through pages to find an open tank spot. Only this time, he didn’t have tank privilege to save his queue time.

“Here,” she said at last, finding the final page of names, where the bottom half of the sheet was empty. “This is the earliest we can get you in.”

“Great,” Courbois said, leaning over the desk to look at the page. Somehow, she still sounded optimistic. “How soon is it?”

“Only six weeks,” the clerk said, checking the pile of loose papers again. “Yes. Six weeks to the day, at nine in the morning.”

Kaldalis felt his vision blur. He wasn’t sure if he was going to laugh, scream, or vomit. He pressed his lips together into a thin line so that he wouldn’t interrupt as Courbois and the clerk discussed the necessary details to secure her spot on the list.

Their voices were the distant muted trumpet sounds of words that didn’t matter at a time when he had larger concerns.

Baimer.

It was Baimer all over again.

Zaran culture was steeped in the sort of bureaucracy that only existed in terrible caricature. He wanted to ask this woman if she was a grade 35 bureaucrat, the 35th highest grade there is. He wanted to make a scene and demand that someone - anyone - acknowledge how utterly ridiculous this all was.

Instead, he kept his mouth shut. He let Courbois handle the sign-up. At the very least, putting her name to the appointment instead of his might spare them a bucket of trouble if Jetmorpan and his council had some oversight of the list.

When they were outside of the town hall again, the four of them exchanged a look.

“Six weeks,” Myrin was the first to say. “This isn’t going to be good for us.”

“If the investigation isn’t over in six weeks, at least we’ll have something,” Courbois ventured.

“In that time,” Balrim said with a weak laugh, “we could observe The Contender, memorize his habits, plan the perfect murder, cut off his face, and I could wear it and impersonate him to lift the restriction.” He shook his head. “I think we need to look into… An alternative method of access.”

“I don’t think we should count on there being another way,” Myrin said with a big stupid grin. “I think we should sneak out ourselves.”

Balrim and Myrin exchanged a laugh about that, but Courbois and Kaldalis didn’t join in.

“You might be right,” Courbois said, “but I don’t want to be a part of it. I have some clout around here, and if I get caught, it’ll all be right in the bin.”

“I understand,” Kaldalis said to Courbois. “And I agree with you wholeheartedly. If we’re doing this, it’s just us. Having some rep in this town is a valuable resource. Considering how often people hating my guts gets in our way, I don’t want to damage your name.”

Courbois smiled, puffing up a bit with pride at that.

“But we’re still going, right?” Balrim asked. “We’re not going to wait for six weeks to follow this lead.”

“Oh absolutely,” Myrin said. “As long as we can break through the first layer of guards around the town, we should be fine. It’s not like they can afford to patrol the whole island.”

Kaldalis nodded. There was no way they were going to sit on their hands for six weeks. This whole setup was in place just to encourage them to keep on the right side of the line, and Kaldalis was not going to stand for it. Although…

“This is exactly what the Contender wants,” Kaldalis muttered, remembering the confrontation in Cotanaku, right before he’d gotten on the boat to come to Kayore. “He wants to catch me doing exactly this. That’s why he went out of his way to talk to me before I left. To make sure I couldn’t deny knowing the rules when I got caught breaking them.”

“What do you mean?” Courbois asked. “Are you saying you’re not going?”

Kaldalis looked around at his companions. A part of him wanted to say yes. The Contender hadn’t had a similar gotcha moment with Balrim and Myrin. They could likely sneak out and deny knowing anything if they got caught. They were also the tightest-knit pair Kaldalis had ever met. A strong and independent team that didn’t need no tank.

But could he send them into the wilderness at night? In a region known for spooky world bosses and crawling with guards who might shoot first and ask questions later? The last time he had actively chosen to allow a companion out of his sight at night, they’d been viciously ripped apart by a spider-snake monster. If something happened to Balrim and Myrin because he chose to let them go without him, he might never be able to forgive himself.

“Hell no,” Kaldalis said, clenching his fist. “I’m saying that we’re not getting caught.”