Mary Jane Knows the Way

While Victor was being taken deeper into the fortress, the rest of My Alchemical Romance remained in the locked barracks cell with a gazer watching through the bars.

They had no weapons, no bags, and no clean plan.

That did not stop them from making several bad ones.

Maine used his invisible Mage Hand to reach back through the high window and collect a few crossbow bolts from the exterior walkway. They were not proper weapons, but in a stripped prison room even a bad dagger was still sharper than nothing. Dhaz, crawling low enough to stay out of the gazer's line of sight, found something better hidden behind a loose stone: a small pouch with twelve gold pieces and an unlabeled potion.

The potion was not healing.

Jonah studied it more closely and recognized its purpose. It would let someone speak with animals.

That made the friendly little rat suddenly much harder to ignore.

Jonah had been calling it a mouse. Everyone else had slowly arrived at the truth that it was very much a rat, and Maine's suspicion turned the room from desperate planning to paranoid theory. The last time a rat had mattered this much, Albert had been involved. Maybe this was another trick. Maybe the rat was Albert. Maybe asking would not help, because Albert would lie.

The debate went in circles. Should they drink the potion now? Save it? Use the rat to scout? Threaten it? Trust it? Jonah saw a sign from the Creator. Ash saw the group trying to solve a prison break by negotiating with a creature they had almost decided to cook. Dhaz took a closer look and finally noticed the detail everyone had missed.

The rat was wearing a scarf.

The name on it was Mary Jane.

Once the potion was used, Mary Jane made her opinion of the party clear. She had been sent by Cynthia of the Wilds to help them, and she was not impressed that they had spent this long discussing whether to eat her.

The information mattered more than the embarrassment.

Cynthia had a camp to the south. If the party could get out of the fortress, they needed to follow the southern trail until they found a cave. Cynthia and her husband, Virgil, were set up there. Mary Jane had come because Cynthia believed students from the school would recognize that a scarf-wearing rat was not random.

The party had not recognized that.

But they recognized the route.

When Mary Jane finished, she slipped back through the hole and returned to her own path. The cell was still locked. Victor was still gone. The Githyanki still held the fortress, Walter, and the party's gear.

But the group was no longer choosing between blind escape and waiting helplessly.

They had a direction.

South.