Okay, so, planning our next steps...

[Dargon]

As of right now, we're one or two days into the "three or five weeks"
that we've got before the Master Trader tells Merrix that we're tryin'
to get Miss Cara out, which will reputedly cause Merrix to try
stoppin' her from gettin' out, for some reason. I don't get it, but
it's apparently tied in with how this place got goin' as a prison in
the first place, and I think we've all found that they hardly got
anythin' right back when they was doin' that. But that's not really
our concern just yet. Heh, they've got Merrix and Dorgon, we've got
Merick and Dargon. Creepy.

Near as I can figure, we've been in here for five weeks [it might be
four... could you check the big calender, Rich?], an, in that time,
we've gotten through four sections. Accordin' to the map, we've
technically got two sections left, but one of them is nearly as big as
three regular sections. So, that puts us at about halfway, distance-
wise, an' if we keep goin' at the pace we been goin' at, we'd be
cuttin' pretty close to the five-week deadline. I doubt we'd be
havin' someone show up to mess with us right when Merrix gets told,
but it'd probably be for the best if he didn't send nobody in after
us.

So, duh, we should try gettin' outta here quick. That's hardly news,
but I actually got a point to all this. From where we're headed, it
looks like it'd be a simple thing to detour into the part of the
section South of us that Vincent says has one'a them knowledge nodes,
along with another of them "lock and key" places that'll have more of
Harrison's magic orbs-that-turn-into-stuff. Now, there's no tellin'
if the stuff we need to work the lock and key will be close by, but it
might be worth a shot, and, really, I'm wantin' a chance to get
Vincent to tell me more about what that axe did to me, like he told
Tirris at the last one. And, given the size of the quadrant we're in
now, I don't wanna waste our time at the knowledge node for this one
with questions about me.

Jeeze, I kinda just kept goin' there. Sorry about that; I guess Elves
talk a lot. I'm just wonderin' if people want to take the time to
detour to that Southern node, or not.

[Doctor Igor]

I think it was 5 because you guys spent a lot of Idle time with the
celestials.

[Tirris d'Cannith]

Just once, I wish it would look like we had enough down-time for me to
finally finish sewing this lovely suit of hide armor.

I really wish I could go back to the time when this prison was created
and slap its designers around silly. Who in the world could design
something this profoundly guaranteed to go wrong? Even if some evil
force were intentionally trying to guide it to fail at its prison-
related goals, that being would also have done a terrible job stocking
up on the smart kind of evil that can really get things done.

I completely agree that we should head South into that area; I did
want to go there originally, until realizing the lock-and-key
information zone was so far North. But now, wonderfully, we are
ourselves so far North!

It seems fairly safe to say that you have turned into an idealized
version of yourself; you are now a disturbingly attractive, clean-cut
warrior, as opposed to a disturbingly scary, wolf-bearded one. What
else did you dislike about yourself? You do not need to tell us what
it was, but I suspect you may have turned those attributes around,
too.

No, that does not mean that my idealized self was some sort of undead
abomination, any more than that my idealized self was a giant eagle or
a wingless owl with a frog's head. I think I touched the axe wrong,
just like everyone else but you did. Good job on that, by the way!