Class Dis-Mythed

The teams entered the maze. I could follow all of the action easily, in one or more of the crystal balls in the Geek's floating office. The All-Pervects went into their half like an army infiltrating enemy territory. One of them went first while the others covered him from the entrance. As soon as he signaled that he was safe, the others followed one at a time.

"Hup! Hup, hup, hup!" they chanted.

So, they'd practiced before they came on the show, too. No team was as inexperienced as the oath of amateur status would lead one to believe. They were simply unpaid. I grinned to myself.

The point man trotted down the first corridor. He reached the corner and paused, waiting for his companions. When they had all reached his location, he set out again, only to disappear from sight.

"Ayieeeee!"

"Deadfall," the Geek said. "You warn them and warn them and warn them, and they still all fall into the first one. I just won a thousand gold pieces on that. Sucker bet."

The Pervect's friends hauled him out. They felt their way along more cautiously, refusing to trust the floor unless they tested it first.

The Geek's engineers had a surprise around the next corner for those who used a toe instead of magik to try out the floor. A female Pervect, in her first turn on point, prodded a tile with a cautious foot. She looked up at the sudden whistling noise above her head. A gigantic weight flattened her to the ground. The others yanked her out from underneath it and propped her up against the wall. She looked winded and bruised. The team leader spoke to her in a low voice. She waved them away. They hup-hup-hupped onward.

I turned my attention to my students. They, too, had approached the maze with caution. Pologne, the research expert, was talking, probably giving them statistics on which way to turn at each crossroads. Bee kept track of the direction they were going, navigating by the stars overhead. Melvine was at the head of the group. The deadfall took him by surprise, but his reactions were quicker than the Pervect's had been. He only dropped a foot before he caught himself and hovered over the empty square.

"Nyah, nyah, nyah," he shouted, thumbing his nose at the sky. "Is that the best you can do?"

"Boy, that kid has attitude," the Geek said, looking pleased. "The crystals caught that. Great stuff!"

"Not that way," Bunny shrieked as the team turned right. That path led through a narrow gap in shrubbery to a dead

end. As the students turned back, the plants reached out thorny tendrils to grab them.

"And the Sorcerer's Apprentices have found the Throtde Vines," Schlein announced. "Will they choke, or will they get past them?"

I was distracted at that moment by a loud roar. The All-Pervects had reached the big chamber in the middle of their maze where the monster waited. The huge container rocked wildly.

Bang!

The top flew off, and a twenty-foot-long red dragon crawled out of the box, hissing and tossing its head. It spotted the Pervects, and issued a stream of fire. The Pervects backed up into the nearest niche to confer. I saw them pretending to pound something, or throttling imaginary necks as they ran over their options.

A cloud of leaves blew upward from the left half of the building. My students jogged out of the dead end, unwinding pieces of vine from their limbs. They had escaped from the Throttle Vines, and were just a few paces behind their opponents in reaching the monster's chamber in their own maze. As soon as one of them set foot in the room, lightning began to shoot out through the container's walls, smashing the urns and statuary arrayed about the walls of the small enclosure. Melvine and Pologne flew upward. The rest retreated around the nearest wall.

"Make that louder," I said, pointing at the image. "I want to hear what they're saying!"

"Is that a weather elemental?" Pologne asked Melvine as they lit down near the others.

"How should I know?" he asked. "Do you want me to go and knock on the door?"

"That sounds like a really good idea," the Pervect snarled back. "There are only a thousand dimensions inhabited by lightning-spitters. Think you can get home town and date of birth, too?"

"You're the researcher—you ask it!"

"Now, stop it, you two," Jinetta said, pushing them apart. "We need to go through that room. We haven't much time."

"Jinetta, it's breaking out," Bee said. He had been keeping an eye on the room. They all peered around the edge of the doorway. A huge catlike backside reared up out of the ruins of the container, topped by a translucent, jointed tail with a stinger. The tail plunged down and stabbed the floor, then it reared up.

ZAP!

A lightning bolt shot out of the creature's backside. It went out the door, narrowly missing the team, and impacted on the far wall, destroying the bas relief of a shepherd and some kind of woolly ruminant native to Perv.

"A Manticore!" Freezia shouted. "It's a Manticore! Oh, no!"