by Deck Davis
Should he take a running jump and try to leap over the pool? Yeah, great plan if he wanted to commit suicide.
He eyed the yellow-colored patch on the platform uncovered by his quick-cast underlay. There was only one thing left to try.
Equipping his pickaxe, he started smashing the platform. The stone cracked, chunks of it firing off, some hitting the wall beside him and other flying into the pool where they were devoured by the lava.
He’d never sweated so much. He’d never felt such a toxic mix of urgency and fear inside him, but he struck the rock again and again until he saw something.
“Tripp!”
Arrows were coming and it was almost time to die, but he’d seen something.
With one last heave of his pickaxe he cracked more stone away, and then he saw a rounded metal protrusion on the platform.
Stamping on it, he heard a noise.
Four noises, each in turn, but they weren’t the sounds of arrows releasing.
Covers slammed shut over the alcoves, and he heard a rickety sound. A bridge started to extend from his platform, stretching out over the lava until it met the adjoining side.
Relief swept through him so hard that he felt his energy leave him. He took a second to breathe, to try to get a hold of himself.
Then, he raced across the bridge and grabbed the lever on the other side. Straining, he pulled down on it, and inch by inch the lever moved until it was all the way down.
“Way to go!” said Bee.
He heard a gurgling sound like a giant plughole sucking out water. Only this was the noise of lava draining; inch by inch, the lava was leaving the pool.
It took a few seconds for the air to begin to cool. He wiped his face, feeling his hands get slick with sweat. He tasted the saltiness on his lips.
Finally, the lava drained way completely, sucked out through what he now saw was a hole in the bottom of the pool. It left an empty space in its place, a sinkhole where the lava had been.
Tripp took a second to let relief dance around his chest like little faeries. He’d done it. It didn’t matter how close to he’d come to death by arrows and lava – he had done it!
Looking at the now-empty pool, he saw that there were three things down there; the hole that the lever had opened to take away the lava, a chest of some sort, and a door cut into the floor.
Now that it was empty, it was strange to see that the pool area was only ten feet deep. He carefully lowered himself down until he touched the bottom, so he was standing in it with the two platforms above him.
He’d done it. Disbelief met with an empty feeling, a hole left inside him once the adrenaline had washed away. He’d beaten room one, and now two things awaited; the chest and the door to room two.
“The chest must be a reward,” he said.
Bee dived, joining him in the empty pool. “Are you going to open it?”
“You bet.”
The chest was undamaged by the lava. It was either completely resistant to it, or it had spawned when he’d pulled the lever. Either way, it was his prize.
It was bronze colored, and when he opened it, a dialogue box appeared.
Room 1 Cleared!
You have beaten the first room in Konrad’s labyrinth, but your efforts have not rewarded you with a silver or gold chest.
Reward: Bronze chest, 600 EXP
The feeling of success started to evaporate. He’d solved the room, but he had missed something.
“Bronze?” said Bee.
“Looks like there’s more than one way to solve each room. I must have messed up; doing something else would have gotten me a gold chest.”
“What else could you have done?”
“Maybe I was too impatient. I saw my first idea, and I latched on to it. I should have thought about it some more. Scoped the room out somehow before committing.”
“The only way to do that would be to enter it,” said Bee. “And then you’d die.”
“Maybe that’s one of Konrad’s lessons; you’ve gotta risk a little pain to get the best rewards.”
“About those rewards…”
“Yeah, let’s see what I earned.”
Loot Received!
Crafting Card: Boots of Anchor
Boots of anchor contribute to overall defense, as well as being artificed to allow the wearer to anchor himself to things.
Konrad’s Stash
A mysterious tube of unknown purpose and strange construction
Konrad tokens: 5
Tokens you can exchange with Konrad the crafter to learn new skills
300 Gold coins
Checking the Boots of Anchor crafting card, he saw a crude drawing of a pair of metal boots. They looked like the steel ones he already had, except with thicker soles that were dotted with holes around the edges. It didn’t list their properties, nor what the boots did.
Konrad’s Stash was an equally mysterious item. It was a metal box with no lid, no keyhole, no hinges. Nothing that would act as a mechanism to open it. Something rattled inside when he shook it.
He pocketed the card, Konrad’s stash, and the gold coins in his inventory. As well as getting the loot, earning EXP by solving the room had leveled him up to thirteen. Knowing how important the mind attribute was to his work, he put his point into it, boosting it to four.
With the chest checked, that left one more thing; the door to the second room.
CHAPTER 34
“Acid? A room full of bear traps? A room where the walls crush me?” said Tripp. “It’s a tough question to answer.”
Bee screwed her golden face in thought. “I asked what do you think will be in the next room. Not, tell me the worst ways to die.”
“Same thing. If Boxe made a glory hole, there’d be a nest of hornets on the other side. His version of a Jack-in-the-box would have live bees swarming in it.”
It was only when he said that, that he realized something. He kept thinking about Boxe and not Konrad, and there was a reason for that.
Konrad hadn’t devised this place. The lovable dwarf was the figurehead for it, an avatar to say the words and to act as Tripp’s teacher, but another entity controlled Soulboxe when it came down to it.
He wasn’t Tripp’s opponent here. The labyrinth itself wasn’t, either. His real enemy was Boxe5 himself; it was the far-reaching AI who Tripp would pit himself against.
He wondered about something else. Boxe altered each player’s path in the game; sometimes in small ways like spawning goblins to test a warrior’s courage, other times by things like setting Tripp down a crafter’s quest line.
“Do you think the labyrinth layout is set in place, or will Boxe change it as I go through it? Maybe if he sees that I’m getting comfortable, he’ll spawn a bunch of trolls or spurt acid from the walls just to mess with me.”
“He does have a sense of humor. Usually at other people’s expense. He’s not evil, though. Cut through his sense of superiority and wade through his grumpiness, and he's not too bad.”
“The idea of him watching me is creeping me out.”
“Pretty strange, huh?”
“Yeah. Not just strange, though. A little exciting, as well.”
“Onward to room two?” asked Bee. She was floating just above the ground near the door cut into the stone, staring at it.
“I need to check something first.”
Random stones protruded out from the pool wall, forming grips. He used these to climb back onto the platform where he’d first entered the room. He opened the labyrinth door, which had unlocked now that he’d beaten the room, and stepped out into Old Kimby.
Back in the mountain tunnel, he closed the door behind him. Compared to the heat of room one, it was to feel the faint cool air that reached this part of the mountain.
“That was intense,” said Bee, her golden face flush with excitement.
“This is the kind of thing you wanted to experience, right?” he asked.
“I didn’t know crafting would be like this. I thought
it’d involve sitting in a room, smashing up iron, looking at books…”
“If that was room one, I don’t even want to imagine what Boxe5 has lined up for me deeper in the labyrinth.”
“Do you need to take a break before room two?”
“No, I just need to try something before we head on.”
He opened the door and stepped into room one again.
“Damn.”
“What’s up?”
Tripp looked at the empty lava pool and the closed alcoves across the room.
“I was wondering if going out and back in would reset the room; maybe give me a chance to earn the silver or gold chests.”
“If it had reset, you’d have to die to get back out. You don’t have any artificed stuff with you.”
“I won’t get through this unless I suffer a little. That’s all part of it – death and rebirth. Dying, coming back stronger. I used to quit stuff when it got too tough, and maybe that’s the problem. If you want anything worthwhile, you have to suffer a little.”
“At least we know that once you clear a room, it stays cleared.”
“It also means that I only get one chance. I’ll have to be choosier with my solutions. If there’s more than one way to finish a room, I need to be cleverer if I want to awesome loot.”
He climbed back down into the pool and stood over the door to room two. This was oval shaped and cut into the floor so that it was flat. There was a brass ring in the center of it. Looking at it made his mind sprint in different directions; what was in there? What rewards would he get? What grisly ways had Boxe5 devised for him to die?
Casting overlay, an analysis of the door came back to him.
Underlay analysis: Door of Tilting Abyss
Wood
Brass
“That doesn’t tell us much,” said Bee.
“I was hoping I’d see what was underneath the door. At least it told us something. Looks like the labyrinth rooms have names, and this one is called Tilting Abyss. I’m guessing it has that name for a reason.”
“Very comforting. The only thing I wouldn’t pair with an abyss, is things that tilt,” said Bee.
“Only one thing for it. Better see what’s down there so I can prepare.”
“You’ll die if you just head straight in.”
Tripp shrugged. “I told you, that’s what this is all about. I have to suffer if I’m going to earn something. Besides, I’m not going first. You are.”
“Did you used to torture the neighborhood cats when you were younger, Tripp?”
When he pulled the brass ring and opened the Door of Tilting Abyss, a switch in geometry messed with his mind. It was such a sudden change that it disorientated him. The door was cut into the ground, so he expected it to open up onto a drop.
Instead, it was like room one shifted around him when he looked into the second door, spinning so that he was looking into a tunnel that he could walk through vertically. It made his stomach lurch, like the sudden drop of an elevator.
“Ready?” he said.
Bee hovered by the doorway. “Tripp, I’m not sure about this.”
“Say the word and I won’t send you in, but sending you into room one helped me a bunch. I need to know what’s in there.”
“Why should I be the guinea pig?”
She was right. She might have been another of Boxe5’s creations. She wasn’t real in the truest sense of the word, and he shouldn’t have felt any remorse about sending her through.
The thing was, what did real actually mean? The nature of games was that they were designed to provoke emotions from you. Same with movies, with books.
When you watched a horror movie and felt a pinch in your chest when you saw the slasher stalking his victim, that was real. Sure, the people on screen were actors, and the situation was dictated by the script, but the emotion it provoked was real enough. Your mind didn’t know the difference between an emotion from something that actually happened, and one conjured by fiction.
That was why it was so difficult to resolve how he felt about Bee. She wasn’t real, but her personality had enough weight to it that it was tough for his mind to distinguish between something that was alive or just lines of code.
“Bee, I’d appreciate it if you could do this for me. I won’t force you to, but it would help.”
“Okay,” said Bee. “You know you could just order me in there, and I would have to go.”
“I know.”
“I appreciate you giving me the option. Lucas once told me I could leave Soulboxe, you know. He said I could live with him. I could control his house.”
“Bee, turn on the lights. Bee, warm up the house before I get home. That kind of thing?”
“I think that’s what he meant. He offered it when I started asking about outside of Soulboxe, about where you come from.”
Tripp started to feel edgy. There was something about this part of Bee that he didn’t like. After spending so much time with her, it was clear that she had more intelligence than she should, and that made her existence in Soulboxe a dilemma.
“Let’s see about room two,” he said.
“It makes you feel strange, doesn’t it?” said Bee. “This idea that I’m here to serve you. I can tell.”
“I’m not even sure I should be saying stuff like this to you, Bee. They never gave me guidelines on how to act with a DF. It’s just that I was here by choice. Maybe it was a choice of playing Soulboxe or having the senseless void of a coma, but it was a choice.”
“And you feel bad because I didn’t get to choose anything.”
“You’re too clever. That’s the problem.”
“Here’s the thing, Tripp. Lucas checks in with all the DFs once per month and evaluates us to make sure we’re working as we should. That’s where he calibrates us.”
“Calibrates you?”
“We siphon our intelligence from Boxe, even if we have our own programmable personalities. Think of us like cars, and Boxe’s intelligence is the gas that makes us run.”
“That makes sense, given that he controls everything.”
“Sometimes, we siphon a little too much intelligence from him. Or he gives us too much. I don’t know which. Either way, not all DFs are like me. Once Lucas evaluates me in our next calibration, he’ll see the problem. He’ll reduce my intelligence to a more acceptable level. Clever, but not overly so.”
“So Boxe gave you more intelligence than he should have. I wonder why,” said Tripp. As he thought about it, a dark cloud gathered in his mind. “Bee, can Boxe control you?”
She eyed him strangely. “Do you think I’m a spy?”
He had to wonder now. Was he looking at Bee or Boxe? Was she a separate entity to the AI, or was she an avatar for him to spy through?
“That’s way too long of a delay in answering,” said Bee, her golden face twisting into anger. “Thanks a bunch. After all the help I’ve given you. Dying for you.”
“Just think about how this seems to me. You told me that you get your intelligence from Boxe.”
“So does every sleel, every orc, every trader, even Konrad. Boxe is a giant gas station, and his intelligence is the gas. The gas you put in your car doesn’t actually drive it, right? It doesn’t turn the wheel or press the accelerator.”
Boxe was a gas station. He’d never thought of it that way but now that he did, he started to understand the genius behind Soulboxe. It meant the devs could give any NPC as much or as little intelligence as they wanted.
Not only that. Boxe could play around with intelligence, too. It was well known that Boxe handled content creation, so he must have had access to graphics packages and personality programming. Boxe could create a character, fill it with any personality traits he desired, then pump them with as much intelligence as he liked. Truly endless possibilities.
“That makes sense,” he said. “I’m sorry I doubted you, but you can understand why.”
“Are you finished being Jason Bourne now? No more paranoia?”
<
br /> “It’s still a problem, Bee. You have more intelligence than you should, and that makes me uneasy ordering you around. We’ll make joint decisions when it comes to what you do, okay?”
“Thanks, Tripp.”
“Can you check room two for me, please? I need to know what’s in there before I can solve it.”
“Here goes.”
Bee swooped down to the tunnel of room two, but then bounced off it, hurtling back against one of the pool walls.
She spun around to right herself. “It wouldn’t let me through.”
Tripp looked up at the ceiling, frustration trembling inside him. “Boxe, if you’re watching this, you’re an asshole.” He looked at Bee. “He must have watched me send you into the first room. He doesn’t want to make this easy.”
“I guess you’ll have to go first after all.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Tripp.
Taking a deep breath, he walked into the tunnel, following it ten meters before it opened out into the Tilted Abyss.
The Tilted Abyss was a circular room made from stone. The ground was purple and divided by glowing yellow lines, almost like a pizza. At the far end of the room was a door that presumably led to room three.
It was something of an anti-climax. No danger, no sign of an abyss. He was almost relieved.
Then again, he was thankful he’d used underlay on the door. Without knowing the name of the room, he’d have just walked out into it blindly. The clue was in the name, or part of it; tilting.
“No guess for what happens when I take a step,” he said.
He checked his inventory for anything he was happy about losing. There wasn’t much; just the wood he’d collected for his campfire, and his sharpened bone dagger. Since he had the morning star and flagellation flail, he didn’t need the dagger anymore.
“Let’s try this…”
He threw his bone dagger to the right, where it landed on the edge of the circular floor.