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Pandora's presence on the stair was detected by Pandexter, who sent up a flying homunculus to investigate. Once he knew that she wasn't a threat, he came up himself to escort her down to his sub-dimensional laboratories.

She gave him an earful about stealing her toy, Basil. A little abashed, Pandexter explained that it was For Science, and that he was reasonably sure that Basil probably wouldn't come to any significant harm, in all likelihood. He explained that he was experimenting with creating self-willed, aware automatism just like Basil. He suggested that perhaps she and the others might like to observe the process, and they went up together to let everyone know what was going on.

Upstairs, about four days had passed, and since all that Tallis had seen was a blur of motion on the stairs and then Pandora disappearing, she was a little worried. When Pandora and Pandexter came zooming back up, her worry was alleviated a little and replaced with righteous anger; she threatened Pandexter with the very sword he had given her only a few weeks before. This proved to be ill-advised, as it became red-hot in her hand and she dropped it. Reef and Chase's expression of vengeful outrage were equally unsuccessful. Pandexter scarcely even appeared to notice that everyone appeared to want to chop him into giblets, which is perhaps fortunate since it meant that nobody had their marrow turned to molten lead or anything like that.

To cut a long story short, he invited everyone down to see what was going on. Reef and Chase elected to stay upstairs, but all the others went down.

They went first to the laboratory where Basil was being worked with. Pandexter summoned and trapped a demon inside him, the demon being bound by a metal sigil soldered to his chest. The theory was that, in Pandexter's words, having a simulation of consciousness already, Basil would be better able to restrain and control the demonic force withing which would then, hopefully, become tractable and malleable over time rather than bursting out ruinously as had happened with previous non-aware automata. Basil agreed to send regular telepathic reports on his symptoms and progress back to a brain in a jar which would record his impressions. As a safety measure, Pandexter had prepared a control mechanism: if the binding sigil should fail to restrain the demon, it could still be given a single command by the bearer of a parchment with a mirror-image of the sigil magically inscribed on it — the idea would normally be to banish the demon without harming the holder of the parchment, but in theory any single command could be given and would be obeyed to the letter.

While in his labs, Pandexter also displayed a remarkable device that showed grainy black-&-white images of events transpiring hundreds of miles away. He found Balthazar, still trudging back home through chest-deep snow drifts, but more importantly, he zoomed in on the camp of the Sword Brethren on the edge of the swamp in which lay the tower of the Umlaut of Traemar, Basil's old master and the power behind the theft of the Heart of the Maiden. The Sword Brethren were already well-advanced in their exploration of the swamp in search of the tower, now having had many weeks head start on Our Heroes. He refused to attempt to scry anywhere close to the vicinity of the tower, being frankly unwilling to risk retaliation by the Umlaut, a notoriously cranky and unforgiving person.