The hallway eventually ends, and it’s only been a couple of kiloseconds, less than an hour, according to my Visor. I distract myself for the second half of it mostly by wondering about the vast coincidence of having compatible timekeeping units, but I’m actually not sure if there are, or if Omniglot is doing some sort of shenanigans behind the scenes.

That’s a disturbing thought in its own right. I’d long since stopped noticing the fact that every word I hear, see, say, or write is being translated for me, until Lily’s made-up word for whatever she thinks Sara is brought that right back into the forefront of my mind. Was that part of the magic of Skills, or just neuroplasticity?

I’d say the latter is implausible for a man in his fifties, and maybe it would be for someone more… baseline, I guess. But the Status I haven’t been able to access in a good long while had Ilk Variant: Voidchild right under where it said Ilk: Human, and even before then I’ve known that I’m not like people were a thousand years ago. People a thousand years ago didn’t live to two centuries no matter what medical care you offered; people a thousand years ago almost always functionally senesced before their first century was through, could give birth by pushing a baby out their pelvis.

People alive a thousand years ago remembered Earth, and said things like nothing we could have done, and meant it, and since everyone’s seen the recordings as part of creche-school, we all know that’s another difference.

Well, whatever. Whether it’s convergent social evolution, Omniglot shenanigans, or some sort of pattern-matching on the dimensional hopping of the blister drive, it’s nice to have hours still be hours and seconds still be seconds. Hopefully the light/dark cycle of Cador will be at least vaguely compatible with my own physiology, though given that magic exists it’s not like it’ll matter all that much. We treated some varieties of depression with phototherapy; given only the magic I know, I don’t think I’d have all that much trouble rigging up a sunlamp and some shades for an artificial diurnal cycle.

I’m jolted out of my reverie and almost-stupor by a soft hand on my shoulder and a voice saying my name. I manage not to react badly, which might have something to do with the emphatically positive associations I’ve been building up around Amber’s touch; when I look over at her, breaking into a smile for no particular reason, she nods her head fractionally over at Khetzi and at the door they’re standing near. It’s titanic; the hall we’re standing in is at least five meters tall, and the door extends to about four-fifths that high, and maybe three meters wide for the bulk of that distance.

“We are pleased to have conducted the Magelord’s party to their accommodations.”

I look at them, then at the door. It takes me a few moments to engage my brain enough to parse the sentence, which might say emphatic contrary things about my supposed neuroplasticity. “I don’t know what’s proper, in this time and in this place, Khetzi. Do I thank you? Do I tip you somehow? Will we be seeing you again? Do I invite you in and offer you bread and salt?”

They blanch at that last one, barely but visibly. “Gratitude is unnecessary; to be your guide and aide in this Tournament is a charge laid upon me by the Lady Herself, and for this I am… well remunerated, even by the standards of this Tournament. Certainly, we cannot enter your quarters, nor any other, nor accept your hospitality; not myself nor Khetzi Gvet.

“We will be a few moments away. Whether we are Khetzi Adn or not when you wish to call us, we will know, and we will arrive.”

A dozen questions almost make their way out of my mouth, but while my social graces are generally pretty awful and I’m an intensely curious person, I’ve learned at least a few guidelines in my decades and Khetzi hasn’t indicated that it would be appropriate for me to ask.

Leaving all of those thoughts aside, I push on the right edge of the door. Nothing happens, so I shrug and push on the left side; there’s no handle and no keyhole, so there aren’t all that many options for interacting with it. The Visor comes out with a thought when pushing doesn’t do anything, and I trace the mana pathways with greedy eyes. There’s a murmuring behind me as my fingers flow across the notional interface, writing categorizers and analyzers and then setting them to work, dissecting the magic into its component parts, but I ignore it.

If it’s just murmuring, it’s not nearly as important as this.

It doesn’t take me a particularly long time to pull the door apart, metaphorically speaking. About three quarters of the patterns I see don’t immediately have anything to do with the door’s function, but the immediate is the key there; there are magical interlocks that flow through those patterns and underlie how the actual functionality-patterns change every time they’re invoked. It’s fascinating, and I’m not sure how long it would have taken me to figure it out if I weren’t already familiar with the principle, and if the change-pattern weren’t relatively simple.

“This is kind of amazing, you know.”

“He wakes, he wakes; the Magelord wakes.”

With the utmost dignity, I manage to not stick my tongue out at Zidanya. “What’d I miss?”

“A brilliant cascade of lights, as though gemstones were the joints and rivers of metals the bones of the door.”

“... huh.” I look around at the, thankfully still-deserted, corridor. “That’s a little unexpected.”

“Very pretty, though.”

“Thank you, Amber.” I roll my eyes at her, but I’m grinning while I do so. “I’m glad to know that my successful deconstruction of what our hosts probably think are impenetrable magics has the side effect of being pretty.”

“Were we left here to stand, then, trying to enter the door, until we asked for help?”

“Maybe. Probably not. No.” I bring the Visor back up; it has a timeout, that’s interesting, and good to know. “This is actually a lot easier to use than it is to understand. See, if you don’t need to actually predict the cyclic group and you can just be sent the generating number…” I trail off, staring at the door. “Except that this isn’t numbers. Well, maybe it’s tangentially numbers? I mean, it could be numbers, if the cyclic group is a, like, a million, and breaks down…”

“Adam?”

“Sorry, it’s just… this is awful and elegant at the same time. You’re right; they did leave us here to stand around until we asked for help, except if they knew what I can… I’m sorry. Here, put your palm on the door.”

Someone else might have hesitated. Amber walks up without a word or pause and, every inch of her radiating calm, puts her hand on the wood. I pulse Manipulate Mana to trigger the exchange, and the door swings open with an absolute lack of dramatics.

There’s a gratifying moment of silence before Zidanya makes everything better with sarcasm. “And so a door opens, and all are impressed and awed.”

“All it takes is a hand on the door and a mana pulse, when it’s in attunement mode.” I waggle my fingers, and a bunch of my interface windows drop out. The finger waggling isn’t precisely necessary, but I’m used to physical feedback interfaces, even if the physical feedback is all telemetry rather than dials and levers; I’m still not entirely used to being able to think at my displays. “Once someone does a mana pulse after having attuned, it’ll drop out of attunement mode and only the, well, attuned people will be able to open the door.”

“How does it function?”

It’s Sara, so I’m about ninety nine percent sure she’s completely serious in asking it. “So, the door’s got a base… Void Between, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the door has a base color, which has a range of something rimwards of a trillion possible values.” I put my hand against the door and give it a pulse. “My mana’s got a base color. I could emit mana in a different color, but why would I? Anyway.

“The door doesn’t store my mana color. If it did, you could just pull the mana color from however it’s storing it, which I will admit I haven’t fully figured out how to do even though… doesn’t matter. Instead, what the door does is store the mixture of my mana and the door’s mana color. My Visor can’t reverse the operation, which means it’s wildly non-trivial, and it should be more or less impossible for someone to, like, emit my mana color based on knowing the combination color, because with trillions of possible values you can’t eyeball it, nobody has good enough eyes. And the reset this to attunement mode color is the combination of all our colors plus the base color.

“It’s not a perfect system. I’d have liked to see something slightly different; mix a shared base color with both signature colors, maybe. But it’s computationally infeasible for me to brute-force without resorting to tricks that I think only an Outsider would have access to or even know about, and that’s not bad at all. There aren’t any obvious flaws other than the inevitable override by Lily-and-minions.”

“Watching the mana analysis on the door end?”

It’s a good question, a great question, and I’m grinning at Sara as I answer it. “Your hypothetical Ariella watching the handshake, and that’s a bit more literal than usual, doesn’t have anything to see. Like I said, the door doesn’t store your mana signature unmixed, at any point; it runs a stream of its own mana through this set of glyphs that I, according to Zidanya’s principles, don’t understand at all—”

“The effect is not the nature.” Zidanya takes the opportunity I give her to snark at me, and I give her a mock-glare.

“—and the very mana that powers the glyph gets mixed with your signature as a side effect, atomically, by which I mean it happens as one thing with no intervening steps. So sure, your hypothetical Benji can grab your hand and run it over an equivalent glyph, but absent that…”

Sara, in lieu of saying anything else, puts her hand on the door and frowns. I can see the pulse of mana in the Visor, and her frown clears. “Noticeable. It will be necessary to kill anyone who attempts to take such a reading.”

“Rules say we can.” I dismiss the Visor and put my own hand on the door. One Manipulate Mana later, the itch is fading; it was, momentarily, like the kind of scab you get after abrasions, but across my entire palm. “Besides.” I grin at everyone, and fish the Home Key out of my pocket. “Anything we really don’t want to risk being stolen, or anyone needing to sleep in true safety?

“I don’t care if it’s rude or offensive, in the eyes of our hosts. We’ll use Keyhome as much as we need to, to feel safe.”

There’s nothing anyone says to that, just some nods, and a moment later we’re all keyed to the door and we step through, letting it swing shut behind us.