Aetuornos Beta 2-6

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

2-6: Towers and Traps

Noire was standing in a room which, by the angle of sunlight coming through the window, had to be at least on the third floor of the tower, possibly much higher. "What the..?" Jack was also present, looking around in confusion. His confusion was understandable, since the last thing either of them could remember was Thora touching the handle of the tower's door in front of them. "What is this, some kinda trap? Hey, how come you didn't detect it?"

The room they were in was in a trapezoidal shape, except that one of its sides—the tower's exterior—was blown out to be a small sector of a giant circle. The opposite side from that had a door on it, and a bit to the left of that door was a small, circular raised platform. "I can only sense mechanical traps," the rogue said. "For something like this, a mage would be your best bet...but I suspect this would be beyond Fiori's ken."

In another, nearly-identical room, stood the two demon-girls. "Uhhh.." Thora's hand was still out in the position it had been to touch the door. "Wwwhoops." She looked around, taking in the surroundings seemed to have just popped into place around her.
"Heheh..um," Fiori's voice came, snapping her attention to the short necromancer. "I guess a high-level sorcerer would have some kinda ward on his door, huh?"

"I guess..? Why would it stick us inside his tower, though?"

Finding herself in a third room of the same kind, Zef took one look around and immediately went for one of the windows, pushing her head into it to look outside as best she could. Grigori took about this long to get his bearings, then slowly turned to see her trying to contort herself between the bars for a few seconds before pulling back out again. "Miss Zef—"
"Can you break these?" she said, pointing.
"Per..haps? It may be magically reinforced, though, and even if it's not, that's a rather small window, and...we appear to be some several stories up?"
The monk crossed her arms. "This body is small and flexible, and this tower would be readily climbed."

"There's a door right in front of us," he said, waving. "Why is your first instinct to leave?"

"This is a trap, and that is where our captor would expect us to go—deeper in."

"Fair enough, but—"

The occupants of all three rooms were interrupted by the sound of a man clearing his throat, and in response they instinctively turned toward its origin, the raised platform. A burst of bright, golden-yellow flame was there, in the process of taking on the appearance of something like hologram made of light in the same shade: An elvish man in a long, simple robe. "Welcome," he said; his voice was the same as the throat-clearing. "Well, not really, but—how else does one introduce oneself to a set of uninvited guests?

"To begin with, my name is Mondelain, and this is an illusion—before you get any silly ideas about attacking it or the device casting it. The real Mondelain is presently indisposed, likely busy doing something actually important. Since you were able to perceive my home, either one of you must possess a modicum of magical talent, or—far more likely—my erstwhile apprentice thought it'd be funny to set you an arbitrary and nonsensical task. Well, to make no mistake, the top floor of my tower is stocked with a number of trivial artifacts I no longer need, and will not miss if taken. If, as I suppose, you want one of them, this is what you'll have to do:

"The enchantment on my doors should have sorted you into small groups based on certain commonalities between you. Each group is standing before a door, which leads to a trial tailored to your likely abilities. Once all groups pass your trials, you will all be taken to the top floor, select an artifact to take, and face its corresponding guardian. So simple even someone foolish enough to intrude on an old sorcerer's abode should comprehend it. Once you've got your prize, you will be promptly escorted out of my tower and bother me no more—if you know what's good for you."

He put up a hand. "You might wonder why I do this, instead of teleporting you miles off or into the sky or something. The fact is that these trials are modeled after common types of traps and mechanisms seen in ancient dungeons, only made far less deadly. I have some devices too complex for the likes of you to understand which will record your methods of solution in order to aid my research elsewhere. Also, much more importantly, this gets people out of my hair without accidentally killing anyone halfway competent, without giving the impression that I will ever give handouts to unwanted visitors."

As the illusion turned back into yellow fire, "burning" its way out of existence, Noire muttered to herself: "His apprentice, hmn? And, colorful fires..." Taking out one of her new set of daggers, she tossed it lightly into the air and re-summoned it to her hand, observing again the purple flame effect that resulted.

"Huh? You got some kinda idea?" Jack asked, watching.
"Sort of. I think there must be some kind of lore to this, but at the same time I think it's likely it will end up being explained to us before too long," she said, approaching the door. "We should get on with this trial business, hmn?" A plaque attached to the door said Trial of the Magicless.

"Yeah, this is some video gamey stuff right here." He sighed, "Ronin's gonna be mad he missed this."

"Well, at least we can regale him with our experiences after this is over," the rogue said, opening the door.

---

Grigori stepped up to the door, reading aloud: "Trial of the Unarmed. Huh."
"I see no reason to play along with this sorcerer's 'trial'," Zef said, annoyed. "He admitted to being absent, and scaling the walls to reach the top will surely be faster."

"Ehh, that depends on how difficult the trial is," the druid replied. "This, at least, seems tailored to folks with only bear arms?" He morphed his right hand to werebear form, presenting the clawed forepaw to her. "Ehh?" She regarded this with a look of annoyance mixed with confusion.

Eventually she just sighed. "This being a 'game', I suppose 'playing along' is what is expected."

"Great."

Opening the door led them into a short hallway with another door opposite, and the druid took the lead. "I hope you'll pardon the dad joke," he said. "It's just that—I've got to admit—your constant stern, serious attitude is something I find terribly attractive. But at the same time, it makes me want to see you lose your composure laughing at a dumb joke. Or I'd like to flick your nose unexpectedly or something—not that I will, but, you know."

"I don't."

"Well, if I had the impression you were interested, I wouldn't have said anything," he said, coming to the door. "But I think it's better to have it out in the open, is all."

Throwing this door open brought them to a tall, square-shaped room lit by some bright-yellow-flame torches in the corners. Their entryway was in the center of one wall, and the other three walls' centers each had a semicircular alcove occupied by a suit of armor 'holding' a weapon. The rest of the room was taken up by flat metal boxes of different sizes and shapes scattered around, and there was a large magic circle which glowed just enough to be visible on the fairly distant ceiling.

The druid stepped inside and crossed his arms, looking around. "Hmm. I think we're meant to reach the ceiling here," he said.

"Why?"
"Call it a 'gamer's intuition'? That magic circle is the only really interesting thing in the room, and these blocks seem intended to serve as a means to get higher up." He went to one of the mid-sized ones, leaning his weight against it and succeeding in moving it a couple of inches. "They just need to be a bit closer together, I think. Hey, how high can you jump on your own?"

"..Height is not really this body's strong suit in jumping. However:" The monk stood up straight, then ran toward a cube around thrice her own height, continuing her run up its side just far enough to catch the edge with her hand and pull herself up on top of it.
"Aww, that's sweet," Grigori said, "I shoulda picked an agile class myself. Welp—in that case, I suppose we need to get you a good run-up to the highest of these, which should be close to the center of the wall..."

---

"Trial of the..Infernal?" Thora gave the plaque on their door a confused look.

"It's 'cause we're both demons, in this game's lore, I guess?" Fiori suggested. "Aaand I'm a necromancer, so my magic is pretty dark-aligned. Plus I guess your 'berserk aura' thing qualifies as slightly black-magic stuff 'cause it, like, makes you recklesser and easier to hit?"
"I feel more like we were sorted into twos, and I was the leftover. Ah well." The berseker put a hand out toward the doorknob, then paused. "...I hope this one doesn't teleport us. That was weird."

"What, you've never been teleported before? It's so convenient!"

She tried the door anyway, opening it. "I uh...'m not much of a traveler. I mean—I've used public access portals before, but not that 'oh, suddenly I'm somewhere else' teleportation. It's disorienting!"

"Oh, heheh. Well, it's not too hard to get used to. The nice thing is it doesn't require an installation at the target location," Fiori said as they walked through into a short hallway. "The not-so-nice thing is you need to pay someone to do it for you. But sometimes there's just no better option!"
"I..guess your job has you traveling a lot?"
"Yep. I'm an artist," she said. "I paint uuhh..I'm not sure how to put it exactly. People say I make 'disturbing and thought-provoking pieces', but if I'm being honest..I usually just put whatever pops out of my imagination to canvas. So I guess I have kinduva 'disturbing' imagination?"

"Like..what would be an example?"

"Oh, well, so lately I've been working on this piece that's like a closeup of a person's chest, except there's a huuge cut right down the middle, and it's open but there's teeth, so it looks like a sideways mouth, and the blood is all—"
"Okay, I've heard enough!" Thora quickly cut her off. The fact that she'd been trying to illustrate the visual idea with her hands didn't make it much better.

"..Sorry.

"Um, what do you do? For a living, I mean?"
"I'm a chef," Thora said. "My restaurant is one of the highest-rated in our city, partially thanks to me. Working there also 'fuels' my power, which is like a different form of eating for demons, so it's even better that I get paid to do it."

"That sounds like a pretty sweet gig. Is there a kind of demon that feeds on, uhm, the emotion of being grossed out or scared of something? I feel like I'd be a decent fit for that, the way a lot of people react to my work..."
"Mmnh..most demons I know of thrive on 'positive' emotions. Like pride, lust, or even laziness..I know there are envy and rage demons, but I've never heard of a specific one that was born recently." They were at the door on the opposite side by now, but she really wanted to finish this conversation before they actually began whatever 'trial' lay beyond. "I've heard a theory that there are more 'pleasure' demons than 'pain' ones these days because there's more of those emotions to 'go around'..which I guess is a good thing?"

"Guess so!" The necromancer stepped forward to take the initiative on opening the door and bounced inside ahead of Thora, heedless of any potential danger—which prompted the taller girl to hurry in behind her, just in case.

Thankfully, there didn't seem to be any danger. Just a big square room lit by yellow torches in the corners with what was obviously a puzzle in it. There was a thin, rectangular slab of metal sticking up out of the floor in the center of the room with a series of nine symbols engraved into it, each one faintly glowing red; the left and right sides of the room had three square buttons each the width of a fist on them, each of which had a unique symbol engraved on it. The buttons and the signboard had no symbol in common. The wall opposite them had a semicircular indentation going from the floor to slightly above Thora's height, which appeared to be empty.

"Uh...do you get this?" Thora said. "I don't get this. I mean—obviously we're supposed to stand on either side of the wall and push the buttons, but like...what's the order?"
Fiori skipped up to the signboard, looking at it for a moment before turning her head left and right. "Hmmmn—ooh, I think I got it!" she said cheerfully.

---

The catgirl and the bull-horned man walked through a short hallway, toward another door. "Soo, uh..."

It would be hard for Noire to say whether she would normally be able to instantly intuit what her temporary companion was trying to think how to say, or if it was just another result of her high charisma. Regardless, she responded right away: "Listen, before you get any ideas: I'm spoken for—happily married, in fact. Also, my real self is male."
"Oh. Sorry."
"Heh, it's all right. I can hardly fault you for being interested," she said, smiling to him. As long as you know what 'no' means.

"Hey, what's that uhh...like, anyway? I've heard it doesn't hurt, or even that it feels good somehow..?"
"Oh, certainly," she said. "Very strange, but pleasant in its own bizarre way. At least, assuming the claims of changing here being similar to the real world are true. But as far as I know, this isn't how it always was. As briefly as a century ago, the majority of transformations are supposed to have been painful, or uncomfortable at the very least. But today, only the first change of freshly-bit werewolves is still that way—and even that can be interfered with by other magic to dull or eliminate the pain. Some suggest Azoth is responsible, but the evidence says that shift began quite a while prior to her ascension."

"Hmm."

Jack opened the door and stepped inside ahead of her, looking around. There was a torch on each corner of the big, square room, holding fire in a very familiar shade of yellow. On either side of the room's center was a square pressure plate around the width of a person raised a few inches off of the ground. The only other remarkable trait of the room was a set of short, wide rectangular holes built into the center of the three walls besides the one the pair had arrived from.

"So...are those traps?" Jack said, coming closer to the pressure plates and pointing at one with the end of his axe.

"Nah, they're far too obvious," said the rogue. "While it is possible that arrows or something could come out of those slots..I suspect our goal here is to stand on the plates and then accomplish...something."

"Yeah, just what I was thinking," he said; it sounded sincere. "So, you wanna take left or right?"
"Hmm, right, I suppose. Hopefully it won't matter too much."

The tall warrior nodded and stepped onto the left plate, his weight pressing it down to be level with the floor. Noire took her place on the other one, readying her weapons and tensing just in case. There were audible clicks of some mechanisms being activated as her plate depressed, but nothing obvious occurred otherwise for a long moment.

"So uh..did we do something wrong?" Jack wondered aloud. "Or..."

---

"Look look look," Fiori said, pointing excitedly. "See this first symbol? A triangle with a dot in the middle. Aand over on the left, there's a triangle button; on the right, there's a dot! See?"
"Oh...duh. So, I guess we push the buttons at the same time that, if you put them together, make each symbol."
"Yep!" The necromancer skipped over to the left side. "Nine symbols for nine diff'rent combinations."

A soft humming sound came from the plate in the center of the room, and the leftmost symbol on it turned from red to yellow, brightening slightly. "Um..something just activated," Thora said, heading to the right side. "Maybe because you figured it out?"
"I dunno, but let's give it a shot! Three, two, one—push!"

The berserker pressed the 'dot' button in with her hand at about the same time as Fiori pushed her 'triangle'. A quiet, high-pitched 'ding' sound came from the slab in the center of the room, and the symbol's glow grew brighter, almost firelike. Then a distinct clicking...no, ticking sound began to emit from the slab—or at least its general direction.

"Uh—I think that's a timer, what's my next button?" Thora said.
"Cross! Three, two, one—"

---

After a flash of bright purple light, Ronin found himself dropped abruptly onto the cold hard floor of a small stone room, one of whose walls was built instead of closely-spaced metal bars, with a door built into it. Past the bars was a larger room with stone walls of its own, seemingly in the shape of a semicircle, or maybe a smaller wedge of a circle. Not that he noticed every detail of that right away—at first he landed painfully (or at least this game's equivalent of such) on his back on the stone floor, then, groaning, pulled himself up to a sitting position. Finally, he picked himself up, looked around, and saw all of this.

The summoner rubbed one of his shoulders where the bird's talons had cut him through his robes—feeling somewhat thankful that there was no 'clothing damage' system in this game, although it gave the slightly inconsistent situation of his skin being scratched through untouched cloth. "Oh, what..?” Stepping up to the bars, he could make out more detail of the room outside: There were torches built into the walls, most of which burned with flames in a familiar shade of purple. Also against the wall were a couple of bookshelves, one of which actually had mostly books on it, but the other one had a random assortment of glass vials and flasks all at varying degrees of filled with differently-colored liquids, and whose bottom shelf was occupied by an assortment of random-seeming small objects, some of which glowed with magic.

The most prominent detail of the room outside, however, was a large magic circle painted onto the central area of the floor in brilliant white. His ingame knowledge only told him that it was 'deeply powerful'; there was no recognition of what kind of spell it might actually be for.

He went over to the door and tried pushing it open, but of course it was locked. "Rrgh, what kinda stupid adventure is this?! Getting locked into a dumb cage.." Incensed, he kicked it a couple of times. "I oughta just log out now and quit for good."
He blinked and recoiled from a bright flash of purple to his right, then turned to find the witch who was presumably responsible for this situation standing there. "Well, you certainly could do that," she said in a happy, teasing tone, "but aren't you curious what happens next?"

Ronin glared at her, crossing his arms. "What, I don't just sit here and wait to be killed or rescued?"
"HEe~heheh!" she cackled, putting a hand up in front of her mouth and arching back a bit. "Now why would I go to all this trouble just for that? No, no, I've got—hold on a sec."

Putting up her left hand with an index finger raised in a 'wait a moment' signal, the witch produced a large bottle of deep blue liquid (mana potion, Ronin's ingame knowledge informed him) and chugged the entire thing before carelessly tossing it behind her at the wall, which it bounced gently off of to land on the floor below instead of shattering. After wiping her mouth with one of her gauntlets she said, "Ahh~. Sorry, all that flash really takes it outta ya when you're my age. Anyway, I brought you here because I have an offer to make you, and I needed you all alone to do it.

"First thing's first, though!" she strode up to the cage door. "You want outta that cage?"
"Yes, obviously. Is this how you treat all your guests?"
"Hee~heehee. I don't get very many guests, with where my tower is," she said, not actually answering the question. "If you want out, you've gotta swear that you'll hear me out in full before trying to leave, and that you won't attack me or try to break my stuff. On pain of being beaten up and thrown back into the cage."

"Uh...I guess that sounds fair?"
"Swear it!" she said, putting up an index finger. "Repeat it just like I said it."
Ronin tilted his head, suspicious. "Why, is it magically binding?"

"Nope! But a contract is a contract. You're an honest mage, aren't you?" She gave him a wide, almost flirtatious smile.

"Okaay..I, solemnly swear I'll hear you out in full before leaving, and I won't attack you or try to break your stuff while I'm here this visit. On pain of being thrown back in this cage." That wasn't exactly her wording, but he hoped to close a few potential loopholes and avoid further injury with the quickly-thought-up adjustments.
"...Ehh, good enough," she shrugged, and swept her hand upward, causing the cage door to open itself with a violent swing outward which just missed her. "C'mon out, then."
"Ssssure..."

Ronin followed the witch over to just in front of the big spell circle, before she abruptly whirled around to face him, surprising him and making him stumble backwards a few steps. "Heheh, got you, didn't I?" she said. "Now, listen close. Before I make my offer, I wanna make one thing perfectly clear: Soon, a massive army of demons and monsters will descend on this country. You got that?"

"Yeah."
"Can you repeat it?"
He nodded. "'A massive army of demons and monsters will descend on this country'," he intoned.
"Ahp!" She pointed at him to indicate he'd gotten something wrong. "Soon."

"'Soon'."

"Good. If nothing else, you make sure that news is known to as many people as you can. The sooner the recent glut of adventurers know what's going on, the better. Now..." She rubbed her hands together eagerly, like someone just about to do something they knew they weren't supposed to.