Auranosa Walled Gardens

[Jackie Cat]

"Wait... Auranosa?"

"We're in Auranosa?"

The Koraidon nodded.

"Indeed. It is a sparsely-populated Commonwealth state, recently incorporated. Its major population centres are the so-called 'Adventure Towns', located in the east and home to various guilds of explorers and delvers. It is notable for its abnormally high density of mystery dungeons, and for its abnormally high density of ancient Aurichalcan ruins. Some speculate the two facts are related."

From her tone, Sada wasn't being cryptic – just infodumping.

"Why the interest?" she asked, as an afterthought.

He then began to inspect the area more thoroughly, looking for any signs in the ancient construct. Or depressions or switches. Maybe the key was with the water, but it was hard to say.

“Cool. Do we think this is a puzzle dungeon, or one that has something to say? Or’d we just miss the entrance to the heart somewhere… Nah, one of those first two. Maybe there’s a thing we gotta get the water to somewhere to open a door? I dunno, never was a dungeon crawler.”

"—the figures depicted here are the ones who constructed this place?"

The closest pillar bore a stylized canine silhouette that kind of reminded her of Powehi. The figure had its arms up, holding a staff with a symbol at its end. Sort of like a cross with a loop at the top. Jade glanced back at where Sada was investigating the glowing control panels, and the paths that the aqueducts took throughout the garden.

"Is it possible to make the water flow in certain paths but not others?" she asked. "Like to make a specific shape."

Sada nodded. "Yes, I suppose so. You believe that this would constitute a kind of shibboleth, or passcode?"

She caught Jade and Virga examining the carven Lucario-like figures.

"It's not a field in which I have much expertise, but my understanding is that those engraving depict members of the Gnostari, or priestly class, who can be thought of as oracles, scientists, or architects. The staff bears a symbol associated with their order."

 

[Ambyssin]

"We think a mystery dungeon in this neck of the woods holds something that will help us in... fixing whatever problem Betel brought us here to solve," Nova replied. Since, well, they were still here, meaning their job wasn't actually done yet. The shadier parts of the Covenant were no doubt still up and running. And after the Mesa, probably going to be more aggressive.

"Any particular pattern speak to anyone?" Nova eyed the channels. "I don't think we can make a lucario out of these. But maybe an Aura Sphere. Out of water."

 

[Phoenixsong]

Logicking out puzzles had never been Leaf's strongest suit. Even when she was just at home playing video games, fiddling with all the options over and over until something finally clicked had been less annoying than struggling to draw weird connections she just wasn't seeing. Might've been fun to try that here, honestly—sitting in a gorgeous garden, watching the water swirl and shift in all sorts of different directions, maybe see how many different kinds of pictures they could make—but Beetle needed them now, not after wasting hours tweaking some made-up shape.

They'd talked about dungeon puzzles some during ranger training, at least. It'd mostly been the specific kinds of challenges the dungeons around the Soja' were fond of issuing, since those were the ones the Soja' Rangers actually had to deal with all the time; there wasn't much you could prepare for when you were talking about a total unknown rift god knew how many miles away. There were usually hints to look for, though. Patterns, stuff that gets repeated a lot, things that look like they're trying to draw your attention toward or away from something...

There are a lot of those statues around here, hummed the voice in the back of her head. There were several back where you first found the meowth, too. If those are so important...

"What about that cross shape?" She inclined her horn toward the statue's staff. The same looped cross shape in multiple places. And this was... "This plaza's a big circle, isn't it? What if... if the water changed to loop all the way around here first, then go down and out to the sides? Are there enough paths for that to work?" Just a guess, but maybe a decent one, maybe? Hopefully they could just try again if that was wrong, and this wasn't one of those dungeons that basically went 'BZZZZT, nope, sorry!' and then the consolation prize for screwing up was one hundred phantasms raining down on your head like confetti.

They had to try something, anyway. Worth as much of a shot as anything else. She turned to the professor. "What do we have to do to change where the water goes?"

 

[Shiny Phantump]

"Why the interest?"

"Oh, it's a promise I made to a friend of mine. She's looking for Auriga, so that she can get home. Got missummoned by..." (Huh, actually, given the faction Sada had worked for she might actually know this already.) "Wait, the name Leona Lycas mean anything to you? Got missummoned when Cipher was hunting for Seth Lycas. She's hoping Auriga can help get her home, and in Blackrock Caldera we were told by a memory of Auriga to come seek her out at a temple that was here some four hundred years ago, where the walls of the world is thin enough for her to speak to people."

While he spoke, he looked over the holographic displays. One of the them seemed to be some sort of guidemap to the flora where all the gardens were covered in text he couldn't read and diagrams of the leaves of plants within, but which also showed him the outline of the aquaduct system.

Gladion didn't know what to do in terms of shape drawing, so once he finished talking, he wasted some of his precious remaining time on Forlas looking to see if it would be possible to draw something silly or obscene. This plaza was round, and then if you went down from there you could take three lefts get a roughly square shaped second ball. Then there was a big straightaway down the middle. The parts weren't really at the right angles and one side of the square was fused to the straightaway but if you squinted a little it kinda worked. He felt somewhat childish for being amused by this when he was supposed to be an adult solving some of the ten thousand ongoing actual problems.

Then, the funny little venus sign thing on the staves was pointed out to him and he realized he was actually a decent chunk of the way there already. If you just took a right instead of the other lefts to form the square and mirrored that to both sides you got the right shape. It wasn't really that hard to see once you were looking for it, so hopefully no one would ask how he'd spotted it. If they did he could always deny everything.

Unfortunately, his garden hologram didn't show what state the junctures were in or how the water was currently flowing. He psychically reached out to Virgo and imaged them the solution that he was thinking of. "Hey, do you think you could fly up high enough to tell us which junctures we'd have to flip to make this shape?" If not, they'd have to actually backtrack to check or find a different hologram that gave them the information they needed.

Spoiler: really shit ms paint drawing in case it's hard to wrap your head around whats going on in Gladion's head visually