When the chips are down and you've been in the dark for too long, sometimes all it takes is a malign, obviously self-interested dragon woman to help guide you towards the light of creating further political instability. All you have to do is walk a little further into that bog of trouble you're already in. One more step and you'll be on the other side! For sure this time!

Though dragons were thought to be largely extinct, it's very hard to prove a negative. How would you go about proving there are no dragons? By not meeting any, obviously, but of course that gets blown out of the water the day you do actually run into one. After that, what do you do? Reclassify it as a species that isn't technically a dragon? Negotiate with it? Ask it stupid questions? As long as it isn't immediately eating everyone, why not try all of the above?

Navigation is easiest when you know where you're going and you have a clear idea of where you've been. That's why the woods can be so dangerous if you get lost, because there's not much of a horizon to find landmarks from. Trying to find your way out of a cave network based on a map written by people who weren't completely accurate about where all the caves are or where they go is going to lead to getting lost about a hundred percent of the time.

The nicest thing about making an escape through a tunnel network designed to facilitate an escape is that the whole process works pretty effectively! Until, that is, that the royal madam you've been forced to escort gets wise and has a few difficult to answer questions.

Having built up a fair amount of social credit, it's now time to cash in everything and see where it gets the team! A person can only spend that credit once, but doing it all at once, before any weird behavior can be stopped or questioned, if often a good way to get away a plot too stupid to work.

The pieces for the grand escape are falling into place! More or less. Every key the team needs to get out of there exists, and there's a way to grab it. But with any multi-step plan, all it takes is a single point of failure or one overlooked snag.

The heads are mostly accounted for and it's now clear a jail break is the only way to get everyone out with their good health! But now the big question is, how can our heroes do it while still hanging on to said good health?

There are two other cat people in the Dark Bottoms, and they've been here for quite a long while. Long enough to be Paul's parents, in fact. But are they? And if they are, then the next big question is how to get them out of there.

Paul has a natural proclivity towards following the rules and respecting a heriarchy, so faking it as a guard in a foreign land is easy when they all inexplicably speak and write the same language! However, it turns out that the Darkbottom guards aren't the only ones our heroes need to worry about down here.

When impersonating a powerful or succesful person, there's one basic rule to follow: even if you don't know what's going on, always pretend you do. That's and it's important to name drop a bunch of people you've met, to establish that everyone wants to meet you and you've met everyone.