by Nikita Thorn
“Good. And what does my message say?”
“That he is an uncouth fool, Lord Chamberlain.” The man’s voice now was once again devoid of any emotion.
“Good,” said the Chamberlain curtly. Tsukuda bowed again as the man turned and left, then he looked back at his rescued prisoners as if nothing had happened. “Follow me, and keep quiet.”
The concealing effect broke as soon as they moved, returning the world to full clarity. Tsukuda quickly led them down the corridor the way the nobleman had come from.
Mamori Hall turned out to be a maze of administrative offices. They passed more shoji rooms and a few uniformed clerks, but no one paid them any attention. A few turns later, Tsukuda quickened his steps as he approached a shoji door, above which was a sign that read ‘Yuuretsu Room’. He slid the door open, waved them in and slid it shut, before finally letting out a deep breath.
The space was not large and was, in fact, two adjacent rooms, separated by a shoji panel which was currently left halfway open. The first room had a few low writing desks scattered haphazardly around, plus a few boxes full of documents. It looked as if someone had recently moved in and had not managed to settle down.
“You shouldn’t have let him bully you,” said Mairin.
Tsukuda turned to look at her, now an amused smile on his face. “Better to keep your enemies thinking they’re in control.”
Seiki had no idea whether he was lying or not.
“That was impressive acting then, if it was acting.” Ippei had his eyes fixed on Tsukuda as if trying to gauge his reaction. “Whether by one or both parties,” he added, with emphasis.
Seiki blinked. “You’re right.” He glanced helplessly at Tsukuda. “But, okay… I give up. If that was an act, I’m just no good for this place. Right now I’m willing to bet my life on the guy’s good intentions.”
“And your life will be completely safe, Unit Chief.” Tsukuda chuckled as he turned to the shoji door separating the two inner rooms. Seiki realized then they were not alone, and now a figure was emerging to see what the ruckus was about.
“Tsukuda!” cried Lieutenant Kato.
Seiki had never seen the young lieutenant in a happy mood before, but now he was grinning ear to ear, and if there were no other guests present, Seiki was sure he would have run over to lock him in an embrace.
“When did you get back?” cried Lieutenant Kato as he made his way toward them. “And, oh…” He composed himself. “Congratulations, Captain, on your recent promotion.” He gave a proper bow.
“What’s this, Kato?” The older man chuckled. “Don’t make me give you an official admonishment for inappropriately aloof conduct.”
The lieutenant smiled. “I’m really happy for you. It’s well-deserved, and much too late already.”
“They have to promote you, too, soon,” said Tsukuda, shaking his head. “Sometimes I don’t understand how Shinshioka works.”
Lieutenant Kato laughed. “Me neither. They now have me review stock on hand.”
“We all need a break after this, Kato,” said Tsukuda. “Night after the Ceremony Feast, my place. Drinks.”
The young lieutenant glanced at the pile of documents on the floor. “The Commander asked to—”
“It’s an order, Lieutenant.” Tsukuda grinned.
Lieutenant Kato grinned back. “In that case, yes, Captain. I’ll be there.”
Tsukuda clapped him on the shoulder. “Looking forward to it, Kato. It’s been a long time.”
“How are things in Fuoka?”
“Long story,” said Tsukuda. “Best told when no one is sober. Right now I need you to take these volunteers off my hand. They wandered into Mazutomo’s plot. So just get them out the Palace.”
“No, we have to expose the guy,” cried Mairin. “They’re doing something with the sake and they even kidnapped Maru.”
Tsukuda looked at her. “I know that, civilian ojo-san, since I was the one who found him and let him go.”
Mairin blinked. “What, you mean from—”
“The unused storage house number seven at the back of the Servants’ Quarters. Yes. I gave him my best healing potion. He’s fine now.”
“Oh.” Mairin’s eyes widened. “Okay, you’re a hero, Captain Tsukuda.”
“Like I said, this is a game you don’t have even the slightest clue how to play, so I’d suggest that at the very least you look and listen and don’t… do anything to complicate things even more.”
Mairin quietly produced the sake bottle from her inventory. “What about this?”
Tsukuda stared. “Where did you get that? This is… no, can’t be.” He shook his head. Then he glanced up at the door then drew a deep breath. “All right. I’ll take this. Thank you very much.” He grabbed the bottle into his chest pocket.
“Hey, that’s… evidence!” cried Mairin.
The man was already halfway out the door. “Get them out, Kato. And, no matter what happens, stay out of this. You have no knowledge of this incident. Understood?”
Lieutenant Kato looked as if he was about to say something, but Tsukuda was already gone, his hurried footsteps fading down the hallway.
“What was that all about, Lieutenant?” said Ippei.
From the young lieutenant’s expression, the man had no better idea than they did, but he looked a little undecided as what to make of his friend’s sudden appearance and disappearance. Finally, he shook his head. “All right, let’s get you out of here.”
“But… the whole evil plot with the sake?” said Mairin. “It can’t go unresolved.”
“Captain Tsukuda will take care of it,” said Lieutenant Kato. “You’ve done enough.”
“Will he be here to stay, Lieutenant?” Ippei asked.
“Where army officers are deployed is beyond both our current scope of duty, Unit Chief.” Lieutenant Kato’s tone was serious, before allowing a small smile to return to his face. “But I certainly hope so.”
Seiki suddenly wondered what it would take to get himself invited to Captain Tsukuda’s drinking party or if, as Ippei had said, there was actually content there after all, although he supposed directly asking Lieutenant Kato would earn him nothing more than a disapproving look.
“And now, you need to get out of here before you get yourselves into more trouble.” Lieutenant Kato slid open the front door. “Come on.”
They followed him down the corridor, which for the moment remained empty. Seiki looked around, trying to see if he could figure out where Mamori Hall was actually located, but the place was a maze of shoji rooms, which he supposed were where all the windows were, and the few at the end of the corridors were all shuttered.
They passed a few more groups of uniformed clerks, labeled Mamori Hall Clerks [Level Unknown], who stopped to give way to Lieutenant Kato and did not question why he had unauthorized clan volunteers in tow.
“As long as we don’t run into that evil Chamberlain guy, we don’t actually have to hide, right?” said Mairin, once they found themselves in an empty corridor once again.
Lieutenant Kato chuckled. “Your Volunteer’s Badge doesn’t give you permission to be in here. Mamori Hall is usually only for high-ranking administrative officials. Normally, even I don’t have clearance, but there’s a shortage of staff for the Festival.”
“So they make you do paperwork. My condolences, Lieutenant,” said Ippei.
Lieutenant Kato grimaced. “Keep your opinions to yourself around here.”
Ippei grinned. “Good thing we don’t plan to be around here any much longer.”
“What?” said Mairin in disappointment. “That’s it? We’ve only done four objectives.”
“That’s more than enough,” said Ippei.
“Seiki?” The kitsune turned to him.
“Well, Maru is safe,” said Seiki. “And I feel like we’re just going to create more problems for Captain Tsukuda. To be honest, we’re kinda bad at this Inner Palace thing.”
“It’s easier once you’ve unlocked the right tools,” said Lieutenant Kato.
They had reached the end of a corridor, and the Lieutenant slid open the door to a tiny room to let them in. There was no door leading outside, and so Seiki guessed this was the beginning of another secret passageway.
“May I?” asked Seiki, gesturing to the small window. Lieutenant Kato said nothing, and so Seiki walked over and slid it an inch open. What he saw, however, was simply a wall and a pine tree in a shaded and forgotten courtyard, where someone had stashed broken furniture. “Never mind. I still have no idea where we are,” he told his friends, suddenly wondering if it was entirely intentional, to give the whole experience a rather disorienting feel of being somewhere they did not belong.
Lieutenant Kato knelt down on the floor to remove one of the tatami mats, revealing a very steep wooden stairway that led back underground.
“Ooooh, that’s neat,” said Mairin. Seiki was reminded she had probably never seen the sewage system under East City. “So, like, the Palace is full of these secret tunnels and no one knows about them?”
“Everyone knows about them,” said Lieutenant Kato.
“How else are you gonna intrigue?” said Ippei. “I think there’s a lot of sneaking around, overhearing things, and figuring out who intends to do what, and where, and when.”
Mairin nodded. “Okay, I can see how some people would love this.”
“So, this is really like East City,” said Seiki. “But instead of… bandits, you have, uh, noble people.”
“Who can be much more terrifying,” said Lieutenant Kato.
“Did you really just say that, Lieutenant?” said Ippei.
Lieutenant Kato smiled and pointed to the staircase. “Go down. It will force a left, and then keep going straight until you see another staircase. You’ll come up behind a building near the front courtyard by the Servants’ Quarters. After the Festival, I expect to see you back reporting for duty at Muraki Fort.”
“You probably won’t see me but you’ll see my friend Koharu.” Mairin giggled. “Anyway, thanks, Lieutenant Kato. Bye.” Mairin burst into her fox form and dashed down the staircase to investigate.
Seiki and Ippei followed her down, and the lieutenant told them once again to go straight until the exit. The trapdoor clicked shut behind them, and they all suddenly found themselves in utter darkness.
Mairin retrieved a candle from her inventory and lit it. “Well, it’s kinda nice that Lieutenant Kato has a life.”
“He said Fuoka, right?” Ippei was apparently on another train of thought. “Now if Fuoka has this guy and Tomoaki-hime, it might not be so bad after all.”
“Who’s that?” Seiki asked.
“Oh, Tomoaki-hime? That’s the Fuoka Ambassador,” said Ippei, as if it was common knowledge.
“So I guess now we do some grotto exploring?” Mairin waved her candle around.
“No exploring,” said Ippei with a sigh. “Just one left, then straight to Third-Rank Official Chiba and out of here, then to the Society’s library.”
Mairin let out a groan. “Fine. It’s just that… when will we ever get to come back here again?”
Seiki paused. “Well, now that you put it that way…”
“Level Twenty,” said Ippei. “If you want to.”
Seiki was rather surprised it did not sound that far away, especially now that he had crossed the halfway point.
“So, like, next week,” said Mairin. “You know, once we figure out all the speed-level tricks from the Society’s library?”
Ippei laughed. “Sounds about right.”
They continued down the tunnel, which turned out to be longer than Seiki expected. The light from Mairin’s candle was too feeble to illuminate the path, but the ground was smooth and perfectly level.
“Lore-wise, the nobles keep changing the underground passageways, you know, build their own, collapse their enemies’, convert some to secret dungeons,” said Ippei. “Design-wise, it’s just so they can have different tunnels for different quests.”
Seiki nodded. This was basically how the sewage under East City worked. “And it’s all—” He was about to say the network was instanced, when his hand met empty air. Unconsciously, in the dark, he had been running his fingers along the wall, and, once again, counting steps. The sides of the tunnel were reinforced with crude wood panels, but right then it seemed like the wood had run out. It was too dim to see, but Seiki felt around the edge, before realizing what it was. “There’s an opening here.”
Mairin ran back with her candle. Indeed, there was a small opening to their right, and the weak illumination of the flickering flame revealed it to be a stairway cut into the earth. They paused for a moment, before Mairin discovered, carved into the wood panel beside it, in crude characters, the words ‘Banquet Hall’.
“Are you kidding me?” cried Mairin. “A secret way to the Banquet Hall right here?”
“I’m sure they did this on purpose,” muttered Ippei.
Seiki remembered someone saying curiosity was a powerful bait.
That someone was completely correct. The opportunity was too good to pass up. Since no one else was invited to the Ceremony the Shogun had planned for the Rogami Clan, perhaps this was to give non-Rogami players a chance to at least see what it looked like.
Ippei let out a long breath. “Okay. One instance of exploring.”
Mairin giggled. “Do you hear the call of the Inner Palace now, Captain Ichiiro?”
“A peek at the Banquet Hall is as far as I go,” said Ippei. “After we’re done with this quest, you’d have to drag me back, screaming.”
The steep, narrow stairway led upward in an awkward climb, and the reason why became apparent once they reached the top. To make room for a very narrow landing, the last few steps were almost vertical, and there was no way to fit three of them on the area just before the perfectly-shaped rectangular panel that most likely served as the door to the Banquet Hall.
“Oh, it’s see-through!” cried Mairin in delight as she leaned close to the panel. “So I guess you can spy on the whole thing. Imagine if we hang out here until the Rogami Ceremony and we can see what they’re doing.”
Seiki was sure Lieutenant Kato would personally come make sure that did not happen if they failed to finish the quest, but a few more minutes could not hurt. He was halfway up the space, and copied the kitsune by putting his face up against the panel. It seemed to be a tightly woven net of some material he did not recognize, too solid to be thick paper, but too fine to be wood, technologically impossible for the setting, and so Seiki concluded it must be the effect of an enchantment.
The kitsune turned into a white fox to make room for Ippei to squeeze up beside Seiki to look through.
“It’s bigger than I thought.” Even with the netted screen muting some of the colors, the extravagance of the interior was dazzling. Bright painted panels lined the side walls, and, behind the polished black stage reserved for the Shogun, was a large painting depicting a warrior in Shinshioka armor slaying a Demonic Clan captain. The warrior’s sword was shining bright silver, as if real precious metal had been used.
Ippei chuckled. “The Shogun’s clearly compensating.”
“Let’s go take a closer look.” Mairin suddenly turned back into a human girl to unlatch the panel and push it open, causing both Seiki and Ippei to duck back down the stairs to make room.
The Banquet Hall appeared to be empty. As Seiki followed the kitsune through the doorway, he realized why the stairway was so narrow. The hidden door was on one of the large square wooden pillars that lined the hall in two vertical rows straight down the building’s length. Seiki noticed they were all painted, with different tree motifs.
The one they had just come through depicted delicate pink blossoms on black branches.
“Look.” Mairin pointed. “Of flowers, the cherry blossom! Maybe if we explore the whole thing we get another objective don
e?”
“I don’t think getting more objectives gives you any extra rewards,” said Ippei. The samurai, however, was already walking off into the middle of the hall, looking around in wonder.
The hall was far from bare. On the floor, lined up in tidy rows all facing the center of the hall, were sets of low floor tables and black and red cushions, presumably for every Rogami Clan member. The center of the hall, the area between two rows of pillars was left empty, and so anyone who walked in would have a straight line of sight to the Shogun’s seat and his extravagant back panel.
According to Kentaro, it would most likely be a nine-course meal presented on wooden trays, each accompanied by season-related poetry, and enjoyed during musical performances and dances by geishas. By the time Kentaro had finished explaining, Seiki had already regretted asking in the first place.
Now, Seiki supposed he could at least imagine what it would be like based on what had been prepared so far. On each table was a set of utensils: black polished chopsticks on a golden fish-shaped rest. A sake bottle, wrapped in thin red and gold cloth, occupied the top left corner of the table, and next to it was a ceramic cup placed upside down.
“Let’s see what happened to this,” said Mairin as she grabbed one of the sake bottles and undid the strings that held up the decorative wrapping. The bottle was an unfamiliar one, but the label was: Bottle of Ostensibly Kichigawa Sake [instance item].
Mairin blinked in confusion. “Okay, help me analyze here a bit. So, Maru comes to deliver the sake. Someone kidnaps him, a man with a red-jeweled dagger, takes the sake, then locks him up in the storage room. So, someone pretended to be Maru, then delivered the sabotaged shipment, forged the delivery stamp. But somehow the sake in the storage room and these ones are not the same?”
“Is it supposed to be a puzzle?” said Seiki, even though he had no idea how figuring out which was real or fake sake was going to help them.
Mairin frowned. “And what about the nobleman’s substitute sake? Or is this the substitute sake?”
“I don’t think we’ve gotten enough clues to put together the whole story,” said Ippei. “I mean, maybe ultimately the plot is so complicated that the sake has been switched so many times by all the scheming nobles that it’s all a huge farce.”