by Aleron Kong
While he was waiting, he also looked at the backlog of experience prompts from the frantic fight with the eaters. Just like the battle with the bugbears, it seemed that he got experience even from the sprites kills. A quick question revealed that the sprites got experience from his kills as well. Yoshi explained that in group battles everyone that contributed to a kill would get some decreased experience. The more people involved, the less the individual experience each person got. Up to a party of five, though, everyone got an equal and unreduced level of experience from completed quests. It seemed The Land followed old D&D rules. Most people accepted that the ideal party size was four, but you always made a party of five. That way if someone had some bad lo mein, and subsequently was spraying dark miso soup out of their bottom, you were still ready to rock with the four who made it to your mom’s garage.
Richter had been slightly concerned that the sprites would have a problem with what Alma was doing, but they just looked curious. Yoshi asked about what was happening, and when Richter explained he just nodded in agreement, “Any opportunity to get stronger should be taken.” It was clear he was still irritated with Richter from the way he spoke, though.
Once Alma was done, they took stock of their surroundings. Sion’s bottle of Pure Light had gone out, and if not for Futen, there would be no light in the subterranean tunnel. The stone of the hallway was different from the antechamber. It was grey slate and the blocks were expertly laid together. Most importantly there were no holes in the walls. After seeing the eaters speed out of holes that should have been too small to accommodate their bodies no less, it was a relief to know that they wouldn’t be swarmed from all directions. The tunnel led on into the darkness. Futen’s light only extended about twenty yards, past that nothing could be seen.
Alma had perched back on his shoulders when she was finished killing the eaters. Yoshi was cleaning his blades, and Sion and Daniella were shouldering their bows and checking their arrows. Other than the quiet sounds the four of them were making, the tunnel was as still and quiet as the grave.
“Well how do we get out of there,” Yoshi asked.
It was quiet for a moment until Richter realized the question was directed at him.
“How should I know,” he asked.
“That internal map that you have been bragging about,” Yoshi said sharply. “Find us a way out.”
“It only works on places that I’ve already been.”
“Only works on where you’ve already been? Not where you are going,” Yoshi asked putting emphasis on the last word. “You do know that’s the exact OPPOSITE of the purpose of a map, right?”
“Oh! Is my magic map not good enough for you,” Richter asked loudly. Not giving Yoshi a chance to respond, “Well let me just check and see if CAN tell us anything. Looking, looking, looking. Wait! I was wrong! It does say something. Yup. It says right here that we’re fucked. Wait, let me check again. Yup! We’re fucked!”
Before Richter and Yoshi started wailing on each other, Daniella pulled the sword adept away, whispering urgently to him. Richter walked up to Sion, who was checking his quiver.
“What is wrong with that guy,” Richter asked.
“Well,” Sion replied, “he’s just kind of in a bad mood. Probably due to falling down a pit, then nearly being eaten, and now being buried alive.”
Richter was quiet for a moment, “Well yeah! But what’s his problem with me?”
“Well,” Sion said again, “all of that happened because you activated whatever was set into that stone.”
Richter was quiet a bit longer this time, “Yeah well, that’s still no reason for him to be a total twat!”
Sion sighed, “I don’t know what that means, butttt, I’m guessing if there were reasons to be a… total twat, then being dropped down a pit, almost being eaten alive, and then being trapped in an underground tunnel, would all be pretty good reasons.”
Richter chewed on Sion’s words and realized his Companion might have had a point. He looked over at Yoshi. “Hey Yoshi, I feel… partly responsible for all of this. I want to apologize.”
The adept looked at him with squinted eyes, and then half raised one hand. He did something peculiar with his fingers though, with only the second and fourth ones extended. As soon as he made the gesture, Daniella grabbed it and pulled it back down.
Richter looked at Sion, “What did that mean?”
Sion looked back and forth between the two men, “Uhhhh, it means he accepts your apology.” He quickly redirected Richter’s attention from the Yoshi’s blatant insult, “If we are going to be trapped in here long, then we might be in trouble. I just used a third of my arrows,” Sion said.
Daniella chimed in to help with the distraction. Walking over, she said, “I used a bit less, but if we run into more hell bugs, my arrows will deplete quickly.”
Richter looked at the two sprites, quite sure that hand gesture did not mean ‘I accept your apology,’ but seeing Yoshi leaning against the tunnel wall clearly pissed, he decided to let it go. This was at least partly his fault after all.
“Not a problem,” Richter said. “I asked Hisako to make me more sprite arrows before we left. She went a bit overboard.” Richter pulled out one of the bundles Hisako had left for him near the Great Seal. Each of the three contained hundreds of arrows. The sprites replenished their stores and Richter put the rest of the arrows back into his Bag. Richter also took the time to give them ten Potions of Clarity each. Yoshi scowled initially, saying he could not afford them, and despite Richter’s insistence he continued to refuse. When Richter repeated Yoshi’s own words about not missing opportunities to get stronger though, he finally accepted.
“So those things were eaters,” Richter asked.
“I can’t believe there is a nest in the Forest,” Yoshi spat. “I still remember fighting to clear the last nest forty years ago. They shouldn’t be back for at least another fifty or sixty years! We lost good sprites during that fight,” he said in a regretful tone. “This is no longer about your quest, Lord Richter. We need to find the nest, and destroy it. Will you help?”
You have been offered a Quest: Scourge the Scourge I. Yoshi has just discovered the Forest has an infestation of hell bugs. He has made clear that finding the nest is more important that anything. He wants your help. Not accepting will cause Yoshi to leave the party and decrease your reputation with him. Yes or No?
Like there was really a choice, he thought. “Okay, how do we start,” Richter asked.
Yoshi looked around at the hallway that contained them and the iron door behind them. He made eye contact with Richter, “We go forward.”
Remembering what had happened when unlocking his first power, he told Futen to move ahead of them and scan for traps. The remnant moved ten yards ahead of them and waited. When they started walking after him, the grey orb matched their pace, staying in front. Richter took lead, followed by Sion and Daniella who had arrows nocked to their bows, and Yoshi brought up the rear.
While they were walking, Richter accessed his inventory. All of the quartz soul stones Gloran had given him had taken up only one slot in his Bag of Holding, each type of larger soul stone also took up one slot with a number next to it to show how many there were of that type. The five soul stones holding the spirits of the hell bugs, though, now took up one slot each. These stones had a pulsating radiance at their center. Richter pulled one out of his inventory and looked at it. The amber jewel did indeed have an undulating spherical light in its heart, that showed a rainbow of colors, changing from second to second. The tingling feeling was still there, but there was also now a slight sensation of warmth. He put it away.
The silence in the tunnel was deafening. The air had adopted a progressively worsening ‘stale’ smell as they went further in. Richter could only guess that opening the iron door had let in the first fresh air this dungeon had seen in ages.
The four party members walked for at least half a day. The tunnel bent and
zigzagged. Occasionally it even led back up for short stints. The actual features of the hallway they walked through, remained uniform, simple grey blocks of closely fitted stone. It was clear that they were slowly being led deeper into the earth.
To stave off boredom, Richter withdrew one of the soul stones containing an eater’s soul. He also took out the Wand of Dark Bolts. First, he simply held the glowing jewel next to the wand, but nothing happened. He left them pressed together for a full minute, but unfortunately, it still didn’t yield a positive result. Next he examined each item, but it just gave the basic stats of each separately. The wand had recharged another five shots in the past day or so. Richter was getting frustrated, but then he remembered Gloran told him to ‘will it.’ He placed the two items together again and imagined the power in the soul stone flowing into the wand. A prompt came up:
Do you wish to recharge the Wand of Dark Bolts with the Basic Soul stone? Yes or No?
Richter chose ‘Yes.’
The same ribbon of rainbow light that appeared when a spirit was captured, now flowed out of the soul stone and into the wand. The gem lost its inner light and then fractured. Richter was left holding a few pieces of broken amber in his hand. He put them away, not wanting to just leave them on the floor of the tunnel. Another prompt appeared:
Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Enchanting. The path of the enchanter is to make the wondrous out of the mundane. You can now add spells to items to greatly increase their strength.
Awesome, Richter thought. The soul stone had added another eleven charges. He was about to use another soul stone when he realized that the tunnel had ended. Directly across from the passage they were in, on the other side of the open area, was an archway made of the same grey stone that formed the hallway. Set into the archway was a large door made of overlapping bands of metal. Four other doors were randomly set into the walls. One appeared to be made completely of long bones, like femurs. Another was made of red iron with no handle or apparent means of opening it. A third was black wood with glowing silver sigils carved into the frame. The fourth was simply a hatch. It looked like a dome, and it bowed outward in the direction of the room. It had a cross-shaped indentation set directly in the center of the dome, but no apparent handle. What concerned Richter, was that it was set two feet off the ground, but was only three feet in diameter. Good god, don’t let the passage way on the other side be a small tunnel, Richter thought. He wasn’t afraid of small spaces per se, he just heavily preferred NOT to be in one.
All of these doors were definitely weird, but everyone in the party was happy to have a change from the tunnel. Richter was about a step into the room when he had a strange feeling. It could only be described as a ‘wrongness.’ He sharply snapped his arm up, hand flat, to stop the sprites behind him. He immediately heard the creaks of Sion and Daniella drawing their bows taut, and the shing of Yoshi drawing his blades. He didn’t know what had alarmed him exactly, but he knew on an instinctual animal level that something in the ‘bad’ category of things would happen if he walked into the room.
Despite being sure of his feeling, he just didn’t see anything. He scanned the room, but nothing jumped out at him. No giant spiders, no robots with laser blasters, and no womp rats. He looked at his familiar.
*Alma, do you feel anyone in the room?*
*No*, she thought back.
Well at least there is that, Richter thought. She had been able to detect those bugbears even though they were hidden by magic. He guessed psychic vibrations were hard to hide, or at least common concealment spells were not aimed at hiding them. That still left the question of what was going on, though. The feeling had not debated.
He expanded his other senses, but still felt nothing. He stared at the walls, the ceiling, the floor… Was that a red glow? He knelt down and examined the floor of the room closely. Unlike the slate block floor of the hallway, the floor of the chamber in front of them was an irregular pattern of shapes: circles, diamonds, rectangles, and triangles. They interlocked with one another in a seemingly haphazard manner. From his lower vantage, he didn’t see the red glow, but his feeling of unease increased. Letting his eyes relax, he gazed at the floor. When he saw the red again, he was able to focus upon it this time. The closest circle had a superimposed red glow. A prompt appeared:
You have found: Level 3 trap.
Congratulations! You have learned the skill: Pierce the Veil. The Land is a place of hidden secrets. Traps to snare the unwary, hidden treasures, booty: both pirate and otherwise. From this moment on, you will be able to find that which others have concealed.
Casting his gaze wider, he looked at the other nearby shapes and with close attention, all of the circles near him began to glow red.
“Relax,” he said to the sprites. “There aren’t any enemies here, but the floor is full of traps.”
Yoshi looked at him, “Who trained you in trap detection?”
“No one,” Richter replied. He tapped one of the rings he was wearing. “It’s called the Ring of Hidden Dangers. It increases my likelihood of detecting traps. The real question is,” he said looking at Futen, “why didn’t you warn us about the traps?”
“The trigger was not magical in nature, my Lord. I have no skill in detecting this type of trap.”
Why doesn’t everything always just work out for me, Richter wailed silently. So far only the circles were glowing, but that still made the floor a minefield. It would take careful footwork to avoid the traps, and one misstep would… well, he had no idea what it would do, but he was pretty sure that it would both suck and blow.
“So what do you think the traps do,” Sion asked.
“Let’s find out,” Richter said. He tossed a small pebble from the tunnel floor towards the other side of the room. It bounced once then lay still. Yoshi reached out a hand to stop him, but Richter’s impulsive action caught him by surprise.
Nothing happened. Richter looked at Yoshi’s irritated expression. “Maybe the traps are duds,” he said.
A loud whoosh heralded a foot-high gout of black flame extending vertically up from the floor in the exact spot that the pebble had first hit the floor. At the same time, a flash of steel showed at the final resting place of the stone. Three different razor wire hoops shot up from the floor crisscrossing each other at ankle height. Both traps started and ended in the space of a second before disappearing completely. The only evidence that anything had happened was a lingering smell of burnt ozone.
“Fucckkk meee,” Richter said slowly, backpedaling away from the dangerous room. What was truly terrifying was that neither of those traps seemed designed to kill. They would just remove a portion of a leg. Then you would fall back on even more traps, and… yeah, definitely in the ‘bad’ category of things. “I thought you said the traps weren’t magical Futen! Since when is black flame not magical?”
“I said the trigger wasn’t magical, my Lord.”
“Greattt,” Richter said.
“Gyoti,” was all Richter heard before a hand slapped the back of his head. Hard. “What did I tell you about just pushing buttons!”
Richter was wired from everything that had been happening, and the disrespect from the sword adept pushed him over the edge. He took a swing at the sword adept who dodged under the blow. The situation would have grown more out of control if not for Daniella.
“Enough! Mother Forest! The Hearth Mother was right,” the female sprite shouted. “There isn’t a brain among you! Lord Richter, Yoshi was right. You had NO idea what those traps would have done. It could have triggered something that would hurt us even though were still in the tunnel. And you,” she said pointing at finger in Yoshi’s face, “are not making a bad situation any better. Gyoti or not, Lord Richter is the Master of these lands, and the Hearth Mother sent you to assist him. Now can you stop bickering like old mothers and act like men? I can show you how if you need me to!”
Richter and Yoshi glared at each other, but by the end
of Daniella’s verbal barrage, Richter was looking down in shame. Even Yoshi looked a bit sheepish. Richter looked back up at Daniella’s fierce expression, and then at Sion. His Companion was standing behind her, clearly trying not to laugh. Little bastard, Richter thought. He looked back at Yoshi. He couldn’t find it inside himself to apologize just for striking back, but Daniella was right. It had been a bone head move. He nodded at the half-human. Yoshi gave a noncommittal grunt in return. Richter decided it was as much bro love as he was going to get. He turned his attention back to floor.
“All of the circles that are close by are rigged. I’m assuming they all are, so what do we do here?”
Yoshi pulled out two small spikes of metal. One had a small hook at the end. The other undulated like a sine wave at the end. The opposing ends of both spikes were sharpened like needles. “We disarm them. Point out the closest trap. Your skill to detect it might be more advanced than mine.”
Richter showed him. The sword adept knelt down to examine it. After a few seconds, he said, “I see it.” His face was only inches away, but he never directly passed any part of his body directly over it. Yoshi looked at it, and then he looked at it, and then he looked at it. After twenty minutes, the other sprites sat down in the tunnel. After forty minutes, Richter joined them and broke out some hard rations from his Bag and handed them to Sion and Daniella. Hours passed.