Soul Bound

1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.4      An Artful Carnivale

1.2.4.36   How do you track an expert at stealth?

Kafana scrambled upright and focused on her mana, while Tomsk moved closer to the circular dent in the squidgy mud at the bottom of the canal that had been created when their tripping of the assassin's pillar trap had left an empty vertical tube that was now conveniently conducting sounds to their air-filled goldfish bowl from the guardroom in the passage below.

Unknown voice : “Con Lidamun-Do. Belex Vinculis.”

The voice was clear, cold and confident. Commanding. It was a tenor voice, probably male, and it made clear that the assassin using it was not the type of person who could be phased merely by nearly drowning in the flood of water draining into their passage that had unexpectedly drenched him when he shattered a millstone impeding the speed with which he felt intruder alerts should be responded to. And most certainly, the tone of voice emphasised, not the type of person it was wise to mess with. A prickle ran down Kafana's spine, and she was suddenly glad they hadn’t hung around longer in the guardroom or tried sneaking any further down the oval stone passage.

Two minutes later, several changes took place in the frequency and timbre at which the gestalt being tracked by her spell was resonating. Thanks to the seamless way that the game's system augmented the instincts of adventurers relevant to a skill they were using, to match those any NPC was likely to have gained during the normal process of earning an equivalent level in that skill, Kafana noticed a pattern in the changes that 'felt' like it must correspond to a smear of butter moving away from her, just as naturally as she'd notice that the only plausible cause of certain changes in the shape of a carpet was the passage of a single mouse-sized object hidden beneath it.

Kafana: {I think he’s heading back to report. Let’s follow him. This way.}

She gently morphed the air bubble, making it crawl along the floor of the canal, keeping it above the trace until she reached the stone foundation blocks supporting the buildings on the far side of the canal. There wasn’t a way through. What had Tomsk said? Ah, yes, ask for advice.

Kafana: “Ok, we’ve located where the secret passage crosses the canal. What are our options for narrowing that down further?”

Tomsk looked happy: “Break through the wall, climb the wall, look for a sewer or some way through the wall, call in reinforcements, try the passage again, go further along the canal until we find a normal way in then make our way back, totally destroy the building…”

Kafana: “A building possibly full of innocent people? No! I’d prefer trying the passage again. Was that even worth suggesting?

Tomsk nodded seriously: “When planning, a good strategist doesn't stop at the first option, or even the first plausible option. They continue until they’ve systematically considered every branch in the decision tree. Finding all the options while you have the luxury to spend time doing so, even options that initially seem hopeless, can help you later . Once an engagement starts, a soldier who reports that they need new orders (because the scientist they were escorting to safety has just been chummed by a landmine) tends to resent being told to twiddle their thumbs. If the soldier finds out, after the battle, that the reason their squad had to remain under fire in an exposed position for a few hours was because one of the strategists back at HQ refused to sign off on a proposed update to the battle plan until he’d finishing checking that the update was the absolutely best one possible, you’d be surprised at how many ‘accidents’ can happen to just one strategist and his tent.”

Tomsk continued: “...look for a door or window and go through a building, triangulation, flying or teleportation.”

Kafana: “Triangulation?”

Tomsk: “Like when you have watchtowers spaced out across a forest. If a fire starts, each tower reports the direction its ranger is facing when directly looking towards the column of smoke. If you take a map showing all the towers, and draw a line from each one in the reported direction, there should be a single point that all the lines pass through, which tells you the exact location of the fire.”

Kafana: “Or, in our case, of the hideout containing the Lilies? I like it. What do you think?”

Tomsk: “Gut feelings are a valuable guide but, when planning formally, it is also a good idea to explicitly check that a strategy meets each of the precise criteria decided upon when defining the mission.”

Kafana held up four delicate fingers and made a show of using them to keep count.

Kafana: “Find their base? Yes.” *tick*

Kafana: “Return safely? Not a problem - we won’t even go near danger.” *tick*

Kafana: “Don’t recklessly put innocents at risk? Yep.” *tick*

Kafana: “Don’t let the bad guys know who we are, what we’re doing or what we can do? Probably not. Unless they have a seer?”

Tomsk: “If they have, your revised triangulation strategy is still unlikely to give away anything not already revealed by our activating the statues. And if it does, you’re still not giving away more than is necessary to complete the mission” He gently tapped her final raised finger.

She obediently lowered it, and felt a warm glow at the sight of his approving expression.

Tomsk: “Finally, a strategist may find several candidates that meet the mission criteria and need to compare them by estimating each candidate’s chance of success and expected cost, before they can pick which one to recommend. But even if you’ve only found one candidate, it is still worth drilling down into the concrete details of how you’d make best use of the forces available when implementing the candidate. Do you send a small fast force or a slow large one? What are their chances of avoiding or winning against the enemies in their way? How likely are they to lose, and how many casualties are they likely to take even if they win? Simulating the possible situations and decisions your forces would encounter, even if you just do it in your mind, is what turns an idea into a real plan. Giving your soldiers a plan that’s not as workable as you’ve time to make it, is a betrayal of their trust in you. Never forget it.”

Kafana was surprised by how intense he sounded and realised that a leader’s responsibility to those under their command wasn’t an abstract ideal to Tomsk - it meant something very real to him, in a way that perhaps she would never fully understand without living through the same dangerously violent arlife experiences that he’d lived through. But she could show that she’d noticed and respected that, by trying to take it as seriously as he did. She looked at her map.

Kafana: “Ok, there’s a junction about four hundred meters south of us. Alderney’s notations show a drinking place named Marisu’s Mirror on the corner. There’s a small canal branching off it, the Rio Inganno, that zig-zags through the area we’re interested in. Let’s head along it, and I’ll point as accurately as I can towards my tracer every sixty seconds or so. If he washes his boots or the magic fails, we’ll at least have a more accurate idea of where to look and be halfway there. I should pick up some goosegrass burrs in case I want to do this again sometime.”

[Skill “Homing” has reached level 13.]

They set off. With a bit of experimenting, she morphed the bubble into the shape of a manta ray which sped them up considerably. The intersection of the lines she added to her overlay map shows he was still moving. She could tell his vertical position was also moving, and asked System to switch the map into a 3D mode so she could add the extra information.

Time to multi-task. She’d have to log out in fifteen minutes.