TAKE X (6-5-17: The End)

> Get up to the top of the structure.



You're not sure what this structure is. Maybe it's here so that if there's overflow, people can still get around? Who knows. There's no ladder or anything, so you can't imagine that it's very useful.

You can kind of see something glinting up at the top.



Luckily, you know exactly how to get up there.



Once you've made it, Gio lifts de Soren up, and the two of you pull him up after. You take in your surroundings - you can definitely see a lot more of the sewers. There are plenty of these odd structures, all spaced inconveniently far apart, without ladders or bridges or anything between them. If you fell off, you'd have a really hard time making it back up.

You make a note to, upon your escape, find out who designed the sewers and punch them. Then you realize that they probably died of old age long ago, so you quickly make peace with the idea that you'd be punching a corpse. Sometimes these things are necessary.



The sewers also seem to be infested with a variety of unfriendly-looking creatures. At a glance, you can make out an ink blot, a bed of sapper mushrooms, a cockatrice, a simple grinnell... even a slime lumbering around back there.

When you were young, your father wrote a reference book on various and sundry creatures all over Ennen. He used some of the entries as bedtime stories for you. Makram Amjad Sr. wouldn't be winning any awards for Father of the Year as far as you were concerned, but it does mean that you know quite a bit about what you're looking at now.

"Okay, be careful, guys," you say. "Don't fall down there with the ink blot unless you want to be eaten from the inside out. Don't touch the sapper mushrooms; they'll try and latch onto you. Don't look the cockatrice or the simple grinnell in the eye. And for the love of all things good, keep your distance from the slime."

Gio and de Soren both fix you with vaguely horrified stares.



"What about that one?" de Soren asks in the sort of way that suggests that he's not sure he wants to hear the answer.

You examine it for a moment, and then it comes to you in the blink of an eye. "Ah, that's a blinding flash of the obvious."

"Oh, sure," Gio says, "now that you say it, I feel like I should have known that."

de Soren looks at the flash for a moment, then looks up. "Aren't these the things that give you sudden bursts of inspiration or knowledge when they're around?"

You nod, kneel down, and look over the flash a bit more closely. You consider poking it, but somehow you feel like that wouldn't be very nice. At least there's one thing down here that won't kill you brutally. You stand back up and try to think of the best way to get out of here.