Minimika

The chief translator and librarian of The Foredweller Research Facility — the person carrying the single hardest job in the ruin: reading a dead language of glyphs from ten thousand oversized Foredweller books, with the whole team queued up asking her to translate their own findings first. A tiny, four-strength wizard with pushed-up glasses and, in the GM's words, "pathetic bookworm energy"; she catalogues by leaving glowing illusory duplicates in each gap so she knows where to re-shelve the books she constantly drops, and she is a card-carrying member of the Librarians Guild — a profession Laewendas has outlawed, which is how the party knows she is not one of the Laewendas-sent scientists.

In a year of work she has confirmed one word.

(Spelling is a best guess: the transcript renders her as Minimika, Dr. Minamika, Minimiko, Mini Miko, Mini Meepka and Mini Meeker within one session. Session 52 recorded the facility's chief translator as "Dr. Rusalaim" — almost certainly the same person under a different garble, kept here as an alias. See Canon Questions.)

Session 53

• The library. Fields Lash's request for a book bearing the sun's alligator-mouth glyph, crawls under Magra's legs, mage-hands down a stack, and pulls the right volume off a random shelf at a random height — "if you'd tried to look for this on your own, you'd be looking to roll a lot higher." Signs Lash up for a library card minted "Secret Underground Bunker," complete with next-of-kin paperwork, and stamps it on return.
• Casts the sunlight scroll. Fetched by Rosa to read the sunlight scroll aloud (the sun-watcher can't cast), she fills the room with 5th-level magic — "if you did this at a vampire, they would explode and die" — and blasts a cone of daylight straight into Lash's face.
• She pulled the sun lever herself. Told that Lash sounds like Rosa — "she's always saying the sun is alive, and if you turn the lever, she'll die" — she mentions in passing that she once snuck into the control room and tried it: "it's not even a real lever. It doesn't move." When the party suggests nobody has simply been strong enough, she folds her four-strength arms. A colleague has spent months charting that lever minute by minute; the librarian quietly went and tested it, and the result is an independent check on what Lash's sun-sight later found.
• Depth is meaning. Handed Silithane's charcoal tracings of the Ankley Island runes, she runs her fingers over them looking for a depth the paper cannot hold, and explains the rule the party never knew: how deep a glyph is engraved encodes its magnitude. Half a millimetre, paired with the "put something inside" symbol, means cupboard; deep enough, the same pair means prison. She corrects the horned fisherman's "door" to "door with hinges" — "Whoever you spoke to was uneducated, which is funny to say because he was a fisherman."
• Takes the tracings and the map. Keeps Silithane's rubbings, has him mark Ankley Island on her map, and commits to visiting it once her contract ends (after home leave and a family holiday) to measure the engraving depths in person. "A language has so many things to learn. And we have so little that we know, but everything we find helps."
• The Ascension. On a high history check she stops Silithane by the sleeve to correct the record on the Shrine of the Immortals: the runes around the Ascension are about mourning, loss and leaving behind. "I do not think many people survived the Ascension" — gesturing at the empty ruin as the evidence.
• A line of contact. Scribbles her personal rune on a scrap and hands it over, to be drawn in chalk whenever Silithane Sends to her, so the message isn't auto-filtered with the ones about his carriage insurance.

Session 55 — the tablet

• A tremor in the night knocked every book off every shelf in the library; the party finds her putting all ten thousand of them back where they belong, one at a time. She has no idea how long it has been since they last spoke — "I lose track of time really badly" — and is delighted to learn the answer is overnight.
• Manhandled a priceless artifact. Handed The Deciphering Tablet, she made grabby hands for it, was shocked by the weight, and multicast four Mage Hands well above cantrip level (one to a corner, strong enough to hold far more than five pounds) to hold it up — then span, flicked and twisted it like someone far too into Rubik's Cubes, exploring how fast the whole mechanism could move. Told it was a Foredweller artifact rather than something the party made, she froze mid-spin: "Oh, I should not have been spinning this so much. Oh, I am in so much trouble with the archaeology department. Please don't tell them." Magra promised not to, on the grounds that the department doesn't know they have it.
• Two more digits. After "less than a couple of minutes" of spinning it, and two natural 18s, she placed two numbers in the corners, one at each end — which with the 3 in the centre the party already had takes the puzzle from insolvable to solvable. Her honest framing of what she brought: two decades of special interest in Foredweller script, worth roughly two years of study-days, and a librarian's problem she still hasn't cracked — "how do you alphabetise books in a language you don't know?"
• Asked to keep a copy. Wanted ten minutes to write down every option on every face and build herself a clay replica — non-spinning, erasable — to work on in her own time, with more clues promised in future. The party agreed. She is now the second person in the world working the puzzle, and reachable by Sending.