With the lock providing minimal security, Wynn finds herself in the tavern's darkened interior. A door leading to the backroom is closed (but not locked), and leads to a short hallway, dimly lit by the occasional candle. It connects a couple of doorless areas (a kitchen and pantry), a couple of locked doors, as well as a narrow staircase leading up, and a heavy trapdoor leading down. A thin crack of light up from the trapdoor, accompanied by muffled grunting and the crack of a whip, suggests that the basement is occupied.

If the basement is occupied, all the luckier for her. He'll be busy down there.

The next locks don't present much more obstacle. She picks each one, one after another, to check what's behind them, aware the clock is ticking.

The first room is a storeroom. It contains a variety of valuable-looking items, including piles of gold ingots, bags of gems, armour and weapon racks (some of which bear obviously-enchanted gear), torture implements (some of which also seem to be enchanted), jewelry boxes (mostly featuring uncomfortable-looking piercings), and a half-dozen collars... five of which look much like those worn by the common slaves, but one of which is especially fancy, and reminds Wynn of the collar around Luna's neck.

On the wall just inside the storeroom, a metal plaque displays a series of runes, some of which are flashing red. Seeing it in a room like this, Wynn is instantly reminded of an alarm system, demanding a password of one who has entered a secure area.

She hisses in alarm, then immediately grabs the fanciest collar and one of the less-fancy ones, then-

-Okay she has a small satchel but that's it, she wasn't expecting a lot of loot, loot is not the point, but this is shiny loot but alarm, so- She grabs a couple of the least bulky enchanted items, stuffs them in the bag, and then runs, having spent about fifteen seconds in the room. Out the treasury, out the tavern door and dashing across the street before she can think to look for any guards coming this way.

She's not thinking anything more complicated than 'oh, shit' at the moment, but if she was - well, she didn't come here to rob anyone blind, just to fix her fuckup with Luna and free her. Leaving the jewels and stuff is fine.

Wynn makes it to the front door before she hears an a loud alarm beginning to sound, which is not the sort of thing that'd make her run slower. The streets are still quiet and dark, except for the moonlight.

Running: That!

She does calm down enough to think before reaching the spot on the walls where she came over. She slows down and tries to listen and look from a spot in the shadows for where the guards are now. Probably on high alert, so. 

There's definitely a noise coming from the tavern, but it's not quite as loud from outside. Hidden in a bush, Wynn hears a trio of guards walk by, heading towards the tavern. They don't seem to be in a great hurry.

-Clamber back over the palisade wall in the same far-from-watchtowers spot as before? It's the watchtower guards she's really concerned with, are they alert now?

By the tune Wynn sneaks her way to the walls, the guards on the watchtower she passed last time are standing up and looking around instead of squatted down playing dice, so they're more alert now than they were.

Okay, so.

She knows how to lay down modifications to her spells. A one time thing compared to the runebinding, but very useful. It takes longer and it's more draining, but she can do it.

What she does is quickly work her way to a point a quarter-turn away from her chosen exit, and lay down a glowing magic circle with a few runes for some multicolored spears of fire to lance into the sky, and one more important rune: Delay. Four minutes.

And then back to her chosen exit spot, breathing hard from the adrenaline and exertion, to wait for that timer to tick down.

In the distance (near the tavern?), Wynn can hear some kind of commotion. Still, Wynn's spell goes off at the scheduled time, and the guards on the wall sure are distracted! There's shouting, and someone is ringing a bell!

Perfect cover to clamber up over the wall in the shadow of the moon, fall the whole way down the other side, and-

-Run. Like. HELL! All the way back to her dugout-hideout, to retrieve the rest of her stuff, and then further. South, south, and more south.

One of the guards is just quick enough to snap off a shot with his crossbow. A bolt smashes into the ground near Wynn, throwing up some dust after embedding itself in the dirt.

Aside from another moment of YEEP! this does not really change her immediate plans. The running will continue. Back to her hideout, and gathering up her stuff. But she's not far enough to be safe, no way. She keeps going, straight south, which seems to be the fastest way away from civilization.

Heading south definitely takes her away from the road, away from the farms, away from any lights, away from civilization. If there's anything like pursuit, Wynn doesn't hear it at this point.

She keeps going, summoning her construct-sled to go faster once most of the obstacles of civilization are gone.

Makes her own makeshift camp and sleeps several hours later when she's getting too tired to keep going smoothly, and then the next morning... Or well, the next afternoon, actually bothers to inspect her loot. She was hoping for notes on how the collars work, but...

Instead, Wynn got a couple of slave collars (one fancier than the other), a jewelry box with a dozen spiky glowing piercings in it, and a short rod that looks something like a branding iron, with a weird runic shape on the end?

She spends a few hours looking over them, following the runes as they play out.

Jesus Fucking H Christ, these things are nasty. The earrings are torture implements, or rather, conditioning implements. Do something very painful on immediate response to magic, or certain thoughts... Which thoughts, she can't quite tell. The collars merit more observation, they're just as complex and tangly as Luna's. The weird branding poker thing... Is also incredibly fucking complicated, which makes her think they kind of go together?

She sketches out all the rune patterns into her handy magic book and starts decomposing them into chunks, modules, to make sense of them.

The nastiest piercing Wynn examines seems straight-up designed to mindbreak its wearer; any thoughts more complicated than immediately obeying orders will be punished, and the harder they're trying to think the worse they're punished, presumably with the end goal that the wearer just stops having thoughts. They're surprisingly intricate work for what amounts to a couple inches of brass plate with a piercing hook mounted, but every bit of the space available is covered in tight, efficient runework, and between the set of them, there's a lot of patterns for using runes to sense various mental states. They'd probably make a little more sense to Wynn if she was familiar with mental magic, but if she wants to make magic items that trigger from mental actions, there are pieces of the solution she wants here, if she's got the stomach to disentangle it.

Exposed to Wynn's examination, the collars have a lot of similar workings; they're designed to sense something like the mental states of obedience and disobedience. The former is rewarded with... happiness, fulfillment, satisfaction? The latter is punished with... physical and emotional pain? There's a lot to examine, but the fancier collar seems like an elegant and complex tool for gradually conditioning the wearer to only truly feel satisfied when they are obeying orders to the best of their ability, and to make any disobedient action or thought unpleasant enough to be not worth considering. The fancy collar also seems much older, and much more permanent, than anything else from the heist... more like Wynn and Luna's "Isekai items" and less like the kind of stuff she's figured out how to slap together. The cruder collar seems like a fragile amateurish attempt at recreating the fancy artistry of the first with more legible techniques, trading a lot of the subtle elegance of the former's reinforcement patterns in favour of hitting harder with its highs and lows, and draining the wearer's mana pool to sustain itself. A lot of the rune sections on both collars are weirdly illegible, but with the fancy collar it feels more like tracing a bunch of really complex interactions written in machine language, and with the latter it feels more like trying to follow some hack of a programmer's deliberately obfuscated code.

That said, there's definitely a lot of similarities between the confusing loops of the cheap collar's runework, and the complex patterns of the branding poker. It's like the rod is a piece of a puzzle the collar represents, and its purpose is to provide a very specific signal that the collar is looking for so that the collar can do... something? Carefully examining the rune-chunk on the actual branding part, it seems to line up well with similar rune-chunks at the ends of the collar. So if the collar were to be closed around someone's neck, the poker would best fit into the runework if placed right across the gap.

The key difference is obviously that the simpler collars just have the magic bound into them while the complicated one has it etched. She's noticed the two different methods she understands, and the etching work is... Impressive. Master craftsman stuff, even compared to what she can achieve with cheat skills. 

Too bad she'll never fucking use any of this. The best she can do is copy it out and try to salvage some of the techniques for something actually good. Wrest a weapon from the very foes of liberty and turn it to the cause of freedom... Yeah, she can make herself study how, precisely, it's screwing with peoples' heads. Though if she had a library to work with it'd be easier...

First priority, though, is figuring out what is obviously an unlocking mechanism. She doesn't have anyone to test it on, but she can see how it would work, with the chance to trace her finger directly over the paths. It reminds her of Zachtronics games, or absurd bitwise code hacks like that fast inverse square root meme.

Anything like that on the fancy, Luna's-collar-ish, collar?

The fancy collar certainly has some kind of closing mechanism. It could probably connect to an unlocking device, there's something like a port for one. It doesn't look like it's designed to connect to the same device that the cheap collar does, though. If the empty spaces on each collar is like a keyhole, the cheap collar is like the old-timey medieval warded locks she picked earlier, and the fancy collar is a complex disc detainer lock with false gates. That said... Wynn does have direct access to all the runework, so figuring it all out is mostly just the challenge of fitting the whole mess in her head (and notebook), methodically working through the conditions at each step.

That said... a dirty hole in the middle of nowhere isn't the comfiest place to do this kind of tedious magical programming work.

Yeah, time to get back to her hut and hope Luna is still there and doesn't hate her.

"Wait, Daisy. Right. Today is... Breezeday, so two days from now at sunset I have to scry for her place. I'd better try that now actually."

Luckily, this is reasonably easy to accomplish. A puddle of water, sitting cross-legged, and going into a sort of trance as she casts north, north, north, looking for the points of scryability that indicate towns and specifically the one in Daisy's apothecary mirror...

It's a bit of a mental workout, but Wynn can eventually skim her way back to town. The most visible reflective surfaces are actual mirrors, of course (and there are some specific extra-visible mirrors trying to attract her attention like they're designed to catch incoming scrys), but the most convenient reflective surfaces are windows. Daisy doesn't seem to be working right at this moment, but Wynn can definitely confirm that she can hit her scrying target.

Perfect!

She hasn't seen this part of the Wastes before, but she remembers the landmarks near where she put up her hut. She has a surprisingly good memory now, though it's not photographic exactly. She heads off in that direction via magic sled, planning to refine her course as she gets close.

Hopefully Luna's okay.

The Wastes continue to be the wastes, and various flora and fauna both mundane and exotic can be seen as she travels... most notably including another one of the slimy pink wolves she saw earlier, which begins chasing her sled. It can smell Wynn's lust, and wants to feed on her by filling all her holes with its tentacle cocks, but it's not willing to burn all the energy it'd take to chase her down when she's going that fast, so if she's not going to stop she can just stay horny and unsatisfied.