AZAG (LORDS OF MARS) GAME

The barkeep nods, and Noxmorte senses someone move up beside him. A woman's voice: "You follow me. No more questions."

A startling moment. The woman is Yirin! She gestures Noxmorte to follow her and slips among the well-dressed crowd, to a discreetly-placed door behind a potted plant. She briefly fumbles with something on the door: a keypad, Noxmorte sees as she pulls the door open and points for Noxmorte to descend the ladder inside the closet behind the door.

The closet is weirdly lit from below: there is a bright room at the bottom of the ladder. Yirin descends after Noxmorte, and about fifteen feet down they dismount the ladder at the narrower side of a large rectangular room, about 20×30 feet with an eight-foot high ceiling. The room is generally just-not-quite-white in color, and is brightly lit by white-but-faintly-lavender glowing panels along the upper edges of the walls. There are doors in the other three walls. The doors are grey metal with no visible handles; each door has a keypad in the wall beside it. There are six grey metal desks in the room, and each desk has two chairs (one at each side) that looks uncomfortable. Each desk also has a ledger-book, an inkwell, and a dipping pen laid on it. No-one else presently is in the room.

"Take a seat," Yirin suggests to Noxmorte. She walks very gracefully to the nearest desk and perches herself on the less-uncomfortable-looking chair, picks up the pen, and opens the ledger book. "Here, sit. Real name?"

"Good. I'm Yirin. Oh, I know you! Weird. Ok." She pulls open a drawer in the desk and pulls out a pendant on a chain. "We have ways of making these cheaply." The pendant is a blood crow feather encased in smooth glass, on a thin silver chain. "The feather is somewhat effective. We reinforce it with a meditative program to achieve a smooth glass response in case a spider tries to crawl your brain. They fall off that response, and go away. It seems like they can't locate us or identify us."

"There is meditative training twice a week. You can find it …" and Yirin utters a series of directions that Esidrix tries to commit to memory. What mnemonics does he use?

Yirin smiles and gestures toward the ladder upward. Then she turns her attention entirely to the ledger on the desk, paging back several leaves of spidery ideographs.

"Wait for the moment," says the barkeep. "You'll know. Keep up with the meditation classes. Another stout?"

The room is as busy as it was when Noxmorte left. It looks like a group of musicians are setting up on a small platform in the far corner.

The musicians tune up their lute and bagpipes, and tighten the snare on the drum.

They start to play a vigorous tune about the life of a bar glass. Many of the well-dressed patrons know the lyrics and loudly and off-key accompany the band's singer.

Unless Noxmorte does something, the set continues for about an hour and a half. Does Noxmorte nurse the single stout, or quaff deep?

Noxmorte wanders back to his solitary room and settles in for the night …

… unless he looks for something interesting, nothing of interest happens to him until the next day of meditation training.

a. Does he look for something interesting before then?
b. If not, does he attend the training?