The floor was covered with small square tiles, just larger than the width of Rahn's thumbnail. At first they had appeared to be solid gray but once she was crawling down on the floor, Rahn noticed little lines of texture going across them all in the same direction. It was as if they were painted with a brush that left strokes or some other type of manufacturing method.

Once she noticed this, paired with the fact that her face was so close to the floor, it made it easy to spot the oddity when she came across it. She ran her pointer finger over the tile that had the textured lines going the wrong direction. She pushed. Nothing happened. She tried to wiggle it and again, nothing happened. It was as solid as the rest of them. But after almost three hours of being in this room, with no other leads, she clung to the hope that this meant something.

"This tile is different!" She said in excitement, then inwardly grimaced. Did I overdo it? Oh well. "Does this mean something?" She rolled her eyes when they didn't respond and simply kept looking at the tile. "Droids." She muttered loud enough for them to hear. She kept trying to pull on the tile but it wasn't loose.

So she stood and approached the female. "You're not going to attack me if I touch you are you?" The female didn't respond so she continued. "I just need to find something to pry up that tile." She explained as she reached into the female's pocket. "Aha. This should do. It's my knife anyway, so I'm sure you won't mind me taking it back." She chuckled, knowing the woman wouldn't respond. She wondered if they would sit there while she drew crude images on their faces with permanent ink, wishing she had some with her. But instead she shook her head to clear her thoughts as she began to push and slice into the mortar.

"This is... really... set..." she commented as she worked on the hard adhesive. "I hope I'm not going through all of this effort for nothing. This could have easily just been a mistake." But she knew it wasn't. No one would take the time to make sure an entire floor of such small tiles were all going the same direction. Especially when you couldn't tell there was even a direction until you were up close. It had to be for a reason. And no one is that meticulous but then doesn't notice one going the wrong way. At least she hoped all of this was true. But even if not, what else was she going to do next? She hadn't found anything else to go off of.

The knife sank in slightly as the mortar broke apart. "Finally!" She applied more pressure and pried it the rest of the way. She pulled off the tile to reveal a button. It was practically the same color as the mortar around it, probably so it would blend in, but it was there. She pushed it without hesitation and looked up to the door, expecting it to open or at least unlock. When nothing happened, her brow muscles furrowed and she sighed.

"Seriously?!" She let out a grunt of frustration. But then her body tuned into the fact that something in the room was different. An energy pulsating behind her. She quickly turned and stood. "Woah." She said somewhat quietly. "You have a monitor wall like in the grand hall library?! I'm sure I don't want to know how much that cost." She knew that something about that wall was different and now she knew what it was. She just hoped the command for this one was the same.

"Link." When the wall flickered to life, colors pulsating across the wall in an outward wave, she sighed and her shoulders relaxed. "Show how to exit this room."

The wall flickered and in the blink of an eye, images of a keypad with instructions on how to operate it were covering the wall.

"Yeah, the problem is I'm not outside to use that keypad. And I don't know the code." She went and sat with her back on the opposite wall, looking across the room to the screen while crossing her ankles out in front of her. "I really wish I had some water right now. Maybe some bread. Cheese! Yeah cheese and bread would be nice."

"Link, display any other methods to exit this room."

The wall flashed slightly but simply went blank, signaling that it heard her request but had no response.

"Link, display any information you have about this room."

The wall slightly flashed but again displayed nothing. Rahn raised her knees up and rested her forearms across them.

"Link, display anything you have on this building."

Again, the wall flashed but this time an image covered the wall, showing the basic floor plan of the building. Rahn stood up and moved to the center of the room, looking at the image more closely. She followed the path she knew they had taken from the front door in order to find the room they were in now. There were several more rooms of varying sizes but there was nothing that showed her how to exit this room, not as far as she could tell. She studied the image for several more minutes, trying to memorize the layout just in case she needed it. Other than that, she saw nothing worth noting.

She returned to her seat against the opposite wall, trying to think of what else she could ask the wall to show her. Eventually she turned toward the male that was closer to her and asked "Any chance we can take a pause on this rousing puzzle for a potty break?"

...

"No? I didn't think so."

"Hmm. Maybe instead of asking to be shown specific things, I should be trying to figure out a code phrase to unlock something." She spoke aloud several minutes later.

...

"But that would take forever to guess." She sighed. "Unless the code is, I hate the premier." She let out a sad chuckle when nothing happened. "Ok, what else..."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

An hour later Rahn sat up with a gasp. "What?" she looked around and rubbed her eyes.

"Oh... right." She must have dozed off and forgotten where she was for a moment. Great, now she didn't know how long she'd been here.

She stood and stretched her arms out with a yawn while turning to look at her roommates. They were both still sitting there, looking straight ahead toward each other.

"I guess you two probably knew we'd be here a while. I bet you even took a nice long nap today." She shook her head again and turned to the monitor wall.

Knowledge, she thought. They knew things she didn't. Just as the organization knew things the grand hall didn't. Meaning... this monitor likely had information on it that one didn't have.

"Link, display any information you have that the grand hall monitor system does not have."

The wall flashed and began covering itself over and over with documents and photographs. The problem was all of them were blurred and covered with a big "Access not granted." message.

"Link." She began and the wall stopped its never ending addition of images. "Narrow these down to anything I have access to."

The wall flashed and suddenly only two images were on the wall. One was the same floorplan she had seen earlier and the other was a file with her name at the top. Or rather, her undercover name.

"I knew you were a stalker." She chuckled as she glanced at the female. "Can't deny it now. Although I wouldn't mind if you did, I'm beginning to feel a bit crazy only talking to myself for hours. Of course, I don't know how long I've even been in here at this point."

She turned and looked back at the wall. "Link, open the file on Lana." Four documents covered the wall. The file had her name, a photo of her someone had taken while she was making a purchase at the market, her former occupation, current occupation, location of her dwelling, and several notes about her personal life. They seemed to be pretty thorough. She was thankful the financial offices were organized into so many separate divisions. It was the reason they had chosen that as her cover. Each division was considered top secret and not one division had access to another. The only people who had access to all of the divisions was Lord Joreth, who oversaw all aspects of economics and accounting for the homeland. Well, him and his staff. Lord Kahal had been able to take care of that easily enough and Rahn knew the brother would be trustworthy. So they had simply made up a new division, one that was directly supervised by Lord Joreth, that no one else would have information on. If any spies wanted to corroborate her story, they would have to ask him directly. Still, they had created background documents that went back well over a year, in case anyone managed to get into his records.

She didn't see anything surprising in her file so the information she needed must be on the other image. "Link, show the floorplan sketch again." In a flash, the images were gone and replaced with one large sketch of the building.

She approached the wall and examined each portion of the image more closely. There were no labels for the rooms to indicate what each was for and no specific details within each room. There were just rectangles that had doors, windows, and dimensions marked. Her eyes landed on the room that she was confident represented the one she was currently in. She stared at it until she felt her eyes burn.

Eventually she closed her eyes and released a frustrated breath. She turned and did a scan of the room again. "Surely the answer is in this image. If this is all I have access to. Unless the answer isn't in this monitor wall at all." She wasn't typically one to think out loud, but she guessed the entire purpose of this experiment was for them to see how she handled the challenge. So she provided them with insight to her thoughts.

She glanced around the room one more time before looking at the image again. "Wait...." she stepped closer to the image and then quickly turned outlook at the room again, a smirk emerging on her face.





~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Author's Note:

Thoughts so far?

What do you think of the characters?

Are there any specific details of Ashima and Kietnan's story that you'd like to see in this follow up, even though they're not the main characters of this story?