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Chapter 36 Inside the Magician’s Vault

  As Fabulosa leaned against the side of the elevator shaft, I stood and walked down the hardwood hallway, whose wood paneling also covered the walls. The spikes at the end looked like the same metal as the skillet, grills, and locked grate. Between the smooth walls and nasty spikes, Fabulosa had taken quite a chance, dangling herself into it to save me.

  The corridor branched midway, and I followed it around a corner to another obstacle. The side passage ended in a long, straight crawlspace. A gravity well beam crossed through its center, bathing anyone in the crawlspace with its blue light. Anyone hit by it would fall back into the dead end.

  If we touched the beam, we might not reach the top. Luckily, we could cover it with a skillet.

  After returning to the elevator shaft, I described what I saw.

  Fabulosa nodded. “We need to be careful about which beams we touch from now on. A gravity well that works for one room might hamper us in the next.”

  “Luckily, we can cover the beam. Both of us can crawl through the crawlspace. Climbing looks impossible.”

  “Right. But first, you need to get me to the crawlspace.” She pointed to the spikes at the end of the hardwood hall.

  I pulled out a knotted rope. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. If I lower you down, you can swing to the branching hallway. The hall goes around a corner to a dead end—although it’ll look like a chimney from your point of view.”

  We grabbed both ends of the rope. Clinging to the edge of the elevator shaft gave Fabulosa an anchor to rappel down the hardwood hallway. We performed the feat with considerably more poise than the first time we supported each other’s weight.

  After Fabulosa scrambled into the side passage, I climbed out of the elevator shaft and walked to her position, crouching on a wall around the corner. “Fab, I can’t get over how strange you look, perched like that.”

  “Me? What about you? My heart is pounding watching you walk. It looks like you have suction cups holding you upright. I just hope they don’t give out somehow and drop you onto the spikes.”

  I casually walked down the branch to the horizontal beam. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to you climbing on the walls.”

  “Hopefully, reorienting myself won’t be difficult. I don’t want to walk sideways for the rest of my life.”

  I studied the beam of light penetrating the center of the crawlspace. “I have an idea. Do you still have that skillet?”

  Fabulosa pulled it out of her inventory. “It’s a griddle. But, yeah, I do.” She threw the skillet at me hard, and I raised my hands to protect myself. Instead of hitting me, it slowed to a mid-air stop, then boomeranged back to her awaiting hands. She cackled with laughter.

  “Hey! Quit it. You could’ve brained me with that.”

  “Not really. Here, think fast!” She tossed it at me harder, but it slowed before reaching me enough that I could pluck it from the air. It felt heavy but in a sideways manner.

  “Wow, that was cool. It flew in a straight line, looking like a trick astronauts do in space.”

  “From my perspective, it looks like anything else tossed in the air.” Fabulosa moved to another location, detached the glow stone from her helmet, and tossed it away from me.

  At first, I thought she cast it aside, but the rock made a parabolic arc and swerved back to me. The change in trajectory surprised me, and I missed it. It clattered onto the wall.

  Fabulosa giggled as I plucked the rock off the wall. It felt strange in my hand, pulling horizontally instead of downwards.

  When we finished goofing around with each other’s physics, I placed the skillet over the beam penetrating the crawlspace. When it touched the blue light, its weight pulled sideways toward the gravity well. After covering the beam, I released its handle, half expecting the heavy object to fall off the wall. But it remained in place, ridding the crawlspace of the ray of light.

  Next, I hooked Fabulosa’s grappling hook onto the grill on which the skillet rested.

  Fabulosa hoisted herself to the grill and used me as a bridge to cross to the crawlspace’s opening. With the skillet blocking the beam, we inched ourselves the length of the crawlspace without difficulty, each slithering across a surface perpendicular to the other.

  Before following my partner, I’d secured the rope around the skillet’s handle. I planned to pull it through behind us after we withdrew from the crawlway. We might need the skillet again to block more gravity beams. If not, Rocky might use it.

  Once Fabulosa left the crawlspace, I followed her into a furnished room.

  Artifacts filled the room at the end of the crawlspace, but their tilted orientation confused me. Everything rested on the wall, including the furniture. The room’s ceiling opened to a long chimney ending in the locked grate we’d seen when we first entered this dungeon. The furnishings looked upturned when we first looked at them from above. We hadn’t realized that the room oriented its contents sideways, congruent with Fabulosa’s alignment.

  Only a tall, framed window agreed with my orientation. A fog barrier partially obscured the room beyond it, but I recognized it as Lord Rammons’ foyer. The frame hung a foot off the ground, mirroring the strange candle painting. My finger disappeared when I poked it into the fog, and it seemed our way back to Malibar.

  Fabulosa sat on a cushioned chair and paged through a manuscript. The book had few images, so she quickly flipped through the pages. “I don’t know if this is what you want, but good luck trying to read this stuff.” She clapped it shut and handed it to me.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  I studied it. It wasn’t easy to hold open because it possessed Fabulosa’s strange, sideways gravity. Its plain cover bore no title information. The easiest way to skim it without the pages flying in my face involved holding it down with both hands. Written in Common, its gothic script resembled black picket fences. Its title explained its contents—An Account of Antediluvian Miros with Commentaries. This had to be the famous Archon, even if the word didn’t appear in its title.

  Academic arguments filled the pages with conjecture and theory. Translating it with the codex would not make for light reading, but with a research rank like mine, I should have no trouble discerning its material. I took the Archon and turned my attention to the other books.

  Most of the books covered history, but I took them all. Hana Bakir and I agreed we could keep the Archon until I didn’t need it anymore, but she’d appreciate as many heretical titles as I could collect.

  “Oh, lookee here!” Fabulosa held up a key. “I bet this fits into the grate.” She walked up a wall and hoisted herself across the ceiling to the chimney leading up to the grill grate 50 feet over my head. To her, the chimney worked like another crawlspace. Hunched over at the top of the shaft, she unlocked the grate.

  “Hey, wait up. I’ll need to pass these items through the first gravity well to reset their orientation. It wouldn’t be smart to let things fly into the sky after all this trouble.”

  Fabulosa came back down with a line tied to the grate. Because it followed her sideways orientation, it stuck against the wall. This funhouse only lacked a wavy mirror.

  The vault contained no weapons, but a football-sized egg intrigued me. “I can’t wait to see what’s inside this.” I gently shook it like a Christmas present.

  “It better not be anything that makes Beaker jealous.”

  “Or hungry.”

  “Eww—gross.”

  I pawed through four large chests filled with bronze pieces—a currency I didn’t know existed. “This guy has nothing but worthless coins. I don’t think we can melt this down for usable armor.”

  Fabulosa shook her head. “Rory says bronze is too soft for arms.”

  The game’s tally of my net worth didn’t change when I placed a handful of coins in my inventory. “The coins aren’t valuable, but they might be magic, so let’s take them anyway. Maybe we can melt them down into pots or something.”

  “And here’s the jackpot—the Rammons fortune.” Fabulosa held a small chest filled with copper and silver pieces to the top. And here’s his gold.” Fabulosa held up 4 ingots of gold. “And we have 12—no 14 bars of silver! And this crate has two ingots of metal I’ve never seen. They might be mithril or coldsteel.”

  I shrugged. “I dunno what coldsteel is worth, but I’m going to guess that it is.”

  “Oh! There’s a ring in the money.”

  “We can check that out when we leave this place.”

  “There’s a whole sled filled with this black stuff. Do we want this?” She held up a glassy, black shard of something. It looked like black glass or crystal.

  I shrugged. Without item descriptions, we couldn’t know what held value. It meant taking everything.

  Fabulosa helped me collect the books. “I’m out of inventory space. Can you carry these?” She handed me a bundle of rotten bandages.

  “What are you doing? You’re not bringing those, are you?”

  “Without item descriptions or Detect Magic, it’s impossible to tell if any of this junk is valuable. Is there any reason not to take it all?”

  I shrugged. “No. But if anything is cursed, we won’t know about it until it’s too late.”

  Fabulosa took the bandages and a bolt of gray cloth. “We’ll take our chances.”

  I went to open my void bag but couldn’t. As a magic item, I couldn’t access any of its inventory. Luckily, the Dark Room had already trained me to keep essentials like food, water, and rope in my personal inventory, so I had access to all my necessities. Still, I filled up the only empty slots in my inventory with the things Fabulosa handed to me.

  Before leaving through the painting with our ill-gotten booty, we needed to reset the gravitational orientation of everything, including Fabulosa, in the first room. Fabulosa carried things up the shaft while I climbed up her rope.

  Fabulosa let me pass her, and I climbed out of the well. I coiled the rope, whose odd gravity kept pulling it to the side. “Oh, wait. You can’t walk over to the firepit anymore, can you?”

  Fabulosa poked her head out of the shaft. “That’s down for me, but I might not have to climb.” She caressed the floor’s smooth stone. “Dropping into the beam will reorient me in the right direction.”

  “You don’t think you’ll smack into the wall?”

  “Not if my gravity changes. I might take a tumble, but I don’t think I’ll take much damage. I want to see if I can land on my feet.” She grinned, anticipating the adrenaline rush.

  I knew the anticipation of pulling off a new skateboard trick and didn’t want to spoil her fun. “Okay, girl. Go for it.”

  After some hesitation, she hopped out of the shaft and flew vertically across the floor, picking up speed until she struck the blue beam. Though airborne, her feet skidded on the ground as if performing a long jump. She turned to me in triumph with fists raised.

  I clapped. “The judges award Fabulosa of the United States a perfect 10.0 for her landing.”

  “That was so much fun! I wanna do it again.”

  “We don’t have time to goof off. I’m worried all this transdimensional hopping might affect our boat schedule. We have plenty of time to hitch a ride back to Fort Krek, but there’s no telling if spending time in this place goes slower than Miros.”

  After ensuring everything we stole obeyed the same vector of gravity, we climbed back down the shaft.

  I sighed. “One last climb down.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. This freaky dungeon wasn’t easy to get through, but it made for a nice break from monsters.”

  We returned to the treasure room and gathered our loot. With a dormant void bag and filled inventories, we loaded everything in our arms like shoppers determined to carry all the groceries from the car in one trip.

  We stepped through the foggy door and out of the magic painting—straight into the Rammons family foyer. The glow of morning illuminated their stained glass windows.

  After rechecking my inventory, I verified that gravity worked on the Archon like any other object. After all that trouble, I wouldn’t want it to fly into the sky accidentally.

  Fabulosa turned to me as I closed the book. “Burglary isn’t my calling. There are not enough experience points in it.”

  “Me neither. Let’s hightail it before we miss our boat.”

  Daylight greeted us when we emerged from the Rammons estate. In the early hours of the morning, servants and merchants filled the streets, but none gave us much regard during their commute to work.

  On the way to the boat, we detoured and left a bundle of history books in a sack on the rear doorstep of Hana’s house. I gave her religious texts and family histories, anything holding no significance to us. Without advances in arts or humanities, their histories read like open diaries of ordinary events and people. I kept anything referring to wars or humanoids or anything loosely related to what passed for natural science.

  Aside from finding the Archon, our Malibar trip involved a mixed bag. Fabulosa’s chance encounter with the town crier might have been the saving grace of the entire trip. Planting seeds with local merchants about Hawkhurst’s trade route would have to do. We hadn’t recruited new citizens or formed political alliances. Our heist might earn us enemies in some of Malibar’s political circles, but that wasn’t a reason to expect fallout.

  The danger of other players prevented us from contacting anyone in Malibar’s government. If Uproar served an alliance of enemy players, it could spell trouble. In a way, he’d done us a favor by attacking Fabulosa. He reminded us that foreign cities weren’t safe even with Aggression.

  The game interface tracking contestants had fallen to 28. Fabulosa killed Femmeny months ago, and since then, Bangers, VeeDiva, and Lightbulb had all checked out of the battle royale.

  Our mission to settle things down in Fort Krek fell on track. If the Archon could put some sense into Commander Thaxter’s squiggles, I’d dub our trip to the East a victory.

  Treasures and Free Rabbits

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