by Deck Davis
“I’ll need you to help with the fiends,” said Tripp. “I have to work out how to open the door to room three, but I can’t do that with the room tilting and giant apes trying to slap the hell out of me. After that, I can only guess that the rooms will get harder. Bigger monsters, and more of them.”
“What level were they?” asked Jon.
Bee floated over to the elf, close to his face. She fluttered her golden eyelashes. “It doesn’t matter, Jon. You can take ‘em!”
Did Bee have a thing for the elf? Could orbs even have crushes on people? He guessed so since she already spoke of game developer Lucas as if he was a god.
Jon and Warren exchanged glances. “That sounds tricky. You definitely couldn’t have done it alone,” said Warren.
Tripp nodded. “We wouldn’t be having this conversation if I could.”
“What my brother is trying to be subtle about,” said Jon, “is the fact that you need us. There’s no altruism in this room; you need us to help with whatever mobs spawn in the labyrinth, and we want rare loot.”
“We better set out some ground rules,” said Tripp. “When I clear a room, a chest spawns. Rule one is that whatever’s in the chests is mine.”
“No groping around your chest. Right. What do we get?” said Warren.
“I’ll let you take any items ranked above uncommon from the mobs we kill. Anything uncommon or below that has a practical purpose in my skills belongs to me.”
Jon nodded. “I can live with that. Warren?”
“Rare quests drop rare loot. As long as the mobs pay up, I’m happy.”
Lizzy crossed her arms. “I’m letting you boys decide this stuff for me. If it has got you two smiling, I’m ready.”
“Great,” said Tripp. “Now that’s settled, we have problems to solve. How do we unlock the door, how do we deal with the tilting, and how can we take care of the fiends?”
CHAPTER 37
“Ideas are like mice,” declared Warren. “Squeeze them too hard too quickly, and they’ll burst all over the place.”
“What’s wrong with you?” said Bee, her glare no less stern just because it was made from golden dust.
“I’m just saying that sometimes you need to let things breathe, and then an answer pops up. Too much thinking is bad for you.”
“Good thing you’ve been looking after yourself,” said Jon. “Now shut up and let us work this out. There has to be something…”
Tripp wished he could feel so optimistic, but it was a struggle. Nobody had an answer for dealing with the fiends, the tilting, and the invisible door.
They were quiet, sucked deep into their own isolated thoughts. Warren stared at the ground, Jon had his eyes shut, while Tripp watched the dust motes swirl in the middle of a ray of sunlight that burst through the window. It looked like a mini-mite ballroom dance in the center of the work studio.
“Anyone got any ideas?” said Lizzy. She was standing in front of them all now, and the way she carried herself reminded Tripp of someone, but he couldn’t say exactly who.
He was going to answer her, but his idea was only half formed.
“No? All of you looking at your feet now, huh?” said Lizzy.
Ah - he knew what she reminded him of now!
“Have you ever been a teacher, by any chance?” he asked.
“Ever been? I still am, outside of this place.”
“Right, sorry. Soulboxe feels so real that it’s like another life.”
He felt his face redden a little. Jon was eyeing him now.
Lizzy took a step forward, her heavy steps making the window frames shake, her trunk twirling and disturbing the waltzing dust motes.
“When you said used to be, you were talking about my illness, weren’t you?” she said. “Did Warren tell you what it is?”
Tripp shook his head.
“Right, and there’s a reason for that. Coming here was a way to meet up with my brothers, and it was an escape, too. You can’t escape something if people keep holding up posters of the thing you’re escaping and saying hey, look at this!”
He held his hands up. “You’re right, I was being an ass.”
“You weren’t, but it’s better we cleared that up now. In here, I’m not just a special needs teacher who can’t walk for five minutes before wheezing worse than an OAP in a cigar den. I’m a big, ugly grey tusk who could crush your skull in two.”
“And what were you going to say, grey tusk?”
“The way I see it, the tilting isn’t the worst part of the room. In fact, I think it works to our advantage.”
“How do you figure?” said Warren. “It sounds like you’d need agility to fight fiends while the floor’s moving underneath you.”
Lizzy gave her brother the kind of look only a big sister could. It didn’t matter she hadn’t known them long, nor that she was in the body of a grey elephant, she had the look down cold. “You could do it that way. Try to balance on the tilting platform like a clown, while battling a bunch of gorillas. Or you could let the tilting take care of it for you.”
Tripp felt Lizzy’s idea grow in his own mind as if a bee had buzzed from her head to his with idea pollen nestled in its furry hide, and now the pollen was spreading.
“If we can find a way to avoid falling when the floor tilts, we can let the fiends fall down into the abyss without having to face them.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” said Lizzy.
“There’s a problem with that,” said Warren.
Tripp nodded. “Yeah; we need to know how to avoid falling ourselves. I have something that will help with that.”
“Nope, I mean a problem with letting the fiends fall. If they go into the abyss, that doesn’t leave us any loot. You’ll get what you want by staying alive and maybe finishing the room, but what about us?”
He’d intended to honor his deal with the three of them. They weren’t his best friends by a long shot, but he’d always believed that once you gave your word to someone, it didn’t belong to you anymore. That was the whole point of giving it; you couldn’t take it back, so Tripp never gave his word to someone unless he was sure.
He needed a way to beat the room and kill the fiends while stopping them dropping down into the abyss so that Warren and the others could get loot.
That gave him an idea.
He paced around now. “There’s more than one way to beat each room, right?” he said. “Three ways, in fact, and each one decides whether I get a bronze, silver, or gold chest. We know that ultimately we’re looking for a key to the door to room three.”
“So there are three different ways to get the key,” said Jon.
“Or, there are three separate keys. It’d make sense if you think about it, because it covers each way of solving the room. So, one method is we stabilize the platform somehow and kill the fiends without letting them drop. Then, it makes sense that one of the fiends would have a key on them as loot, right?”
Warren grinned. “That makes sense.”
“Another method is one I already got the clue for. When I finished room one, I got a crafting card for Boots of Anchor as part of my loot. Who’s going to bet against the anchor boots helping with the tilting?”
“Maybe they’re like moon boots,” said Warren. “You’d be able to walk around the platform as it tilts, and there will be a key on the other side or something.”
“That’s it! That would be a test of my armorer and artificery skills, so that has to be a solution. That leaves us missing one more way of getting a key.”
Jon had his eyes closed as if he was walking through the mental picture Tripp had created for him.
“Anything?” said Tripp.
Jon shook his head.
“Me neither, but I want to get this right before we go in. There’s one thing I can say for sure; the Boots of Anchor solution is going to get me the bronze chest.”
“You can you say that for definite?” said Lizzy.
“I got the anchor boots card for unlocking the bronze chest
in room one. It makes sense that a bronze chest would only give a bronze clue for the next room. Besides, it seems too easy and too obvious. We better take a while to think on this.”
“We’re going to level up in the plains,” said Warren. “You want to join us? If you’re in a party with other players you get a share of EXP if you’re near enough when we kill stuff.”
“I can’t. I need to go see my wise old mentor.”
After leaving the group he found Konrad not in his shop, not in Old Kimby, but eventually in his house, a ramshackle wooden cottage at the top of a path that wound east from his work studio. It was a homely place, the kind you’d book for a weekend to get away from everyone. The type of house where there was no television, no internet, just a log fire waiting to be lit, a rug waiting for a dog to stretch out on it.
Glora, Konrad’s wife, answered Tripp’s knocks on the door. He was taken aback when he saw her; where Konrad’s face was a wrinkled desert, Glora had marble skin, smooth enough that he imagined rain drips ran straight off her. There wasn’t just an age gap between them, more of an age Grand Canyon.
“You must be Tripp,” she said. She grabbed him with surprising strength and hugged him. “Konrad told me about you. It’s nice to see your face. Come in.”
She stepped aside, and Tripp walked into Konrad’s house to find a kind of happy chaos waiting for him. There was a pot bubbling on a stove and sending out wafts of delicious stew aroma. One of Konrad’s younger boys was playing a game with a small golden puppy, where they’d take turns chasing each other around the kitchen table.
Konrad was sitting on a chair with his middle-son next to him. The boy must have been around twelve. He had a blindfold over his eyes and a scattering of metal cogs and parts on the table in front of him.
“Use your fingers,” said Konrad. “Examine the joints, the grooves. Learn how things feel when they’re supposed to fit together, and you’ll be able to take anything apart and put it back together again.”
He saw Tripp, then patted his son on the shoulder and stood up. “Keep practicing,” he told him.
Tripp felt at home in their little abode. It emanated goodness and familial love. Not to mention the stew smelled amazing. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said.
“It’s nae bother,” said Konrad. “I heard you solved room one. About feckin’ time!”
“Konrad,” warned Glora, her eyes stern.
“The lads are going to learn bad language eventually, why not from their dad?”
The blindfolded boy dropped a metal gear, which rolled off the table and clattered onto the floor. “Feckin’ hell,” he said.
Konrad gave Tripp a worried look and put his hand on his back, pushing him. “Let’s take this outside before Glora kills me,” he said.
Where the house was warm and the aroma hunger-inducing, stepping outside was the opposite. A cold breeze hit him, and it felt more constricting to be outside, even though Konrad’s house had been small. Tripp guessed it was the presence of Old Kimby looming above him, a rocky beast that spread out for miles and miles.
“Let’s go to the work studio,” said Konrad.
“You said that you heard I beat room one?” said Tripp as they walked.
“Aye. I made the labyrinth, so I get told when you make progress and when you don’t.”
“You heard about room two as well, then?”
Konrad nodded. “Aye. What concerns me more is that you only unlocked the bronze chest in the easiest room of the lot.”
They reached the studio now and stepped inside, and Tripp was hit by the smell of oil and dust, and the warmth of the forge teased over his face.
“I’ve been over it in my head, but I can’t work out what I could have done differently,” said Tripp. “The hidden switch unlocked the bridge and drained the lava; what else was there to do?”
“A blacksmith doesn’t improve his skills by knitting cardigans. A soldier doesn’t become an expert swordsman by fishing for cod. When it came down to it, the bronze solution meant using underlay and mining, not artificery.”
“What kind of artificery would have earned me the gold chest?”
“Therein lies the problem. Or, the choice, actually. I told you that you’d earn Konrad tokens in my little maze of tricks, yes?”
“I got five from the first room.”
“You can exchange these with me for new skills, ones that other armorers or artificers out there might not have. Or you can exchange them for solutions to the rooms you have already completed.”
“Why would I need that? Room one is behind me now.”
“Sometimes you have to look at the past and see the mistakes you never even knew that you made. The future has its roots in the past, and its best to make sure those roots are strong.”
“Is that a way of saying I could learn something about future rooms if I knew better solutions to ones I’ve beaten?”
“If you want to be blunt. You earned five tokens for earning the bronze chest; that’ll be enough for either one new skill or one solution. Which do you want?”
CHAPTER 38
“A fine choice,” said Konrad. “But definitely not what I thought you’d say. Are you sure that’s how you want to spend your points? I don’t give refunds.”
Tripp always thoughts choices were like geodes. You never knew what was inside, and you needed to smash one open to find out. Could be regret, could be a rush of gratitude, but you had to crack it open to know for sure.
What about this geode? Did he choose the skill or the solution? Which would he get the most benefit from?
Earning a new skill sounded promising, especially one that other armorer players might not have. That was what he wanted, after all; to create the armor and weapons that other people couldn’t.
He had to think about the future, though. If Konrad told him how to solve room one to get the gold chest, it’d be an insight into how the labyrinth worked and the planning that went into each room. Knowing how the best solutions were designed would give him an edge in the next three rooms.
“Okay, tell me how it’s done. How would I have earned the gold chest in room one?”
“Positive.”
Konrad grinned and hopped up onto the workbench, sitting with his legs dangling over the edge. “So, you go into the room and the alcoves open, right? Then they start shooting arrows at you.”
“I couldn’t see who was actually shooting them.”
“Artificed crossbows, another example of my work. You’re not really meant to see them, but the arrows are important. Have you heard of a mirror shield?”
“Nope.”
“It’s a crafting card. You can get it on the plains at night; sleels sometimes drop them when you kill them.”
He thought back to when they’d killed the sleel in the pit. Had Warren and Jon found a mirror shield crafting card?
“What then?”
“There are two parts to this,” said Konrad. “The crossbows shoot their arrows at you. There are four crossbows, and that’s a specific number. There’s a reason for everything in the labyrinth.”
“So I’d need a mirror shield to deflect the arrows at something?”
“See? You’re getting it! The question is, what would you need to deflect them at?”
“I couldn’t see anything. Just the lava and the secret button.”
“Your artificery goggles help you uncover the secrets of things. Metal, stone, everything. Level up your artificery, and these hidden layers get easier to see. If you had, you’d have seen four little targets on the room walls, two to the left, two to the right. Deflect the arrows at them, and hey presto.”
“That’s it? I just needed a mirror shield and my goggles?”
“That’s not forgetting the skill you’d need to make the shield in the first place, and then leveling your artificery enough that you can see stuff. Hey, don’t look glum. The solution you came up with was okay, for a Nickel. The iron shield you made, your little stepping stones across the lava. I
t didn’t work, but it was a start. A bucket half-filled is better than an empty one.”
“This is crazy. How could I have possibly known all of that stuff?”
“There are clues, Tripp. If you had taken your time instead of rushing to get it done, you might have figured it out. That’s your first lesson here; a crafter requires patience.”
Tripp felt like slapping himself. He knew all about patience; after all, he was a carpenter. He was used to spending hours working to get things exactly right. Why had his impulsive streak taken over when he needed it the least?
Even so, the gold solution was ridiculously difficult for the first room. Was Konrad’s first lesson that he needed to think outside the box? Maybe that was the basis of artificery; don’t limit yourself. Think about what’s impossible, then make it possible.
He had a lot of work ahead of him. He guessed he was going to need to level his artificery now; there must have been something in room two that his goggles would show him.
He kicked himself for missing the solution, but he still felt a little better knowing.
“One last thing, Konrad. In the bronze chest I got something called Konrad’s Stash. It’s a metal box with something inside, but I can’t open it.”
“You can’t open it, or you haven’t figured out how yet?”
“Both, I guess.”
Konrad tapped his face, just below his blackened ovals where his eyes had once been. “You need to learn to see,” he said. “But not with your eyes. Your eyes lie to you. Perhaps some things don’t want to be opened.”
“I’ll have a think on it,” said Tripp.
“You do that; I have trouble to sort out. The feckin’ guild is closing ranks on me. Having a mining operation of my own is good and all, but there are some things I can’t get. I have to buy all my artificery essence from a trader, and the bastard is refusing to sell to me. I think Winthrop flashed some gold his way.”
“Good luck.”
“You too,” said Konrad. “You’re one level away from completing the Nickel rank of armorer, aren’t you, lad? Think carefully when you do that, okay. No rash decisions.”