[ti]quest[/ti]Nine Lives, Plus One

Petal cheered as the whirlpool drained all her troubles away. She whipped at the sides of the vortex like a potter slapping her clay to make it spin faster. "Get out and stay out, you...you..." she struggled to find the right word, and her skin tinted red with the stress "you compost!"

She panted, watching the Kartana drain away along with her rage. Petal's vines found Zac, and she lead him out into the open like a long-range seeing-eye dog. "Was that too rude?" she asked, now uncertain whether she'd crossed some sort of line. "Compost is actually really important for plant growth. It's full of nutrients!"

"Compost is trash that helps plants like you and me grow strong, ay?" he asked, giving her vine a squeeze. "Sounds perfect to me."

The origami attackers were, appropriately, guarding papers. Zac's highly tuned blind-sight drew him straight to a stack of memos like a politician to a female intern. "Money! No, just paper. But maybe important paper," Zac smirked, and sniffed at the paper. "Oh yeah, this is the good stuff. Some sort of," sniff sniff "internal notice about," sniff sniff "a murder in the," sniff sniff "boiler room? Nah I'm drawing a blank here. What does it say?" he asked Morgana Riddle, passing her the papers.

Zac has had the Seer class equipped for seven months.

"I never get flu shots," Zac said proudly. "Don't need 'em! I've got a metabolism like one of those Greenland Sharks. I can hold my breath for almost forty minutes too!"

His ears twitched as Morgana unscrewed the bottle. "I'm thirsty, sure, but you're not gonna get me with another prank like that time you got me to drink one of my fountain pens. You first!"

At the comment about his head Zac just grinned, and perhaps too late he added some family insight. "Big head big heart, those are the two anatomical abnormalities that all true Ramsays share. Your head was that big the day you were born!"

Zac caught the sock, a reflex born of many years on stage catching thrown undergarments and loose change. "Thanks! And you know what I will take a sip." He raised the vial to his lips cautiously. "This smells like fizzy milk," he said wisely. Then, with barely a wince, he gulped down his half of the vial.

Instantly Zac started to shrink. Not his massive, oversized melon, but the rest of his body. In moments he and Morgana were just a pair of toddling babies with improbably (but historically accurate) head to body ratios.

"Hey, did you get my other shoe too?" he asked.

"You heard her Petal," Zac said, ducking his massive head and following Minigana into the tunnel. "We've only got until midnight until my shoe turns into a pumpkin." His body had shrunk, but his voice was disconcertingly the same on account of his vocal chords retaining their original length.

The group hustled through the tunnel, crawling their way through ancient grime and discarded trash. Like any secret tunnel it was more full of disappointment than majestic treasures.

"This reminds me of the time I, uh, accessed a Burger King after hours to get back the keys to my van. The assistant manager cheated and won them from me in a game of Two Horse Blind. Now normally I'm all for a bit of cheating, but I had to get to Montana to pick up a crate of, uh, lemon drops. And anyway Jeff was this real weedy piece of work, and he hadn't payed me back from helping him paint a lewd mural on his cousin's tattoo place." Zac's riveting story was cut short when he stepped on a bent rivet and jerked upwards, banging his head on the low ceiling.

"What type of lock does the safe have?" Zac asked, handing Morgana a crooked piece of metal from his inner pocket. "If it's a combination lock then check to see if there is a bit of give in the dial. If there is then pull it towards you firmly and turn it clockwise. Reverse the direction as soon as you feel some resistance, like a little catch in the dial. Do that once more and it should just spring open!"

"If they use an actual key lock, then use the metal. A safe lock will usually have five to ten different little pieces of metal that are hanging down from the top of the barrel and preventing it from turning. Turn the handle to put a bit of pressure on the hanging pieces. Then move that metal rod slowly into the barrel, poking the hanging bits back UP into their tubes. Repeat a few times and that little devil is as good as open."