Jason frow the obje his hand. The ivorous mandrake proved to be the most generous mohus far in terms of loot, produg not only ara tin of the precious healing u, but also something new.

  Item: [Trowel of the Blood Cult] (iron rank, unon)

  A gardening implement ented to affect certain kinds of pnt. (tool).

  Effect: Improves health of ivorous pnts.The trowel looked rather sinister, made out of some kind of bck metal with a red sheen. It carried the wear marks of having been used as a pnting tool, but also a raze that was wholly unnecessary fardening purposes.

  “Blood cult?” Jason read unhappily from the item description. “Who gardens with an evil trowel? Whose hedge maze is this?”

  Not having anythier, Jasohe sharp trowel in hand, on the ready for more monsters. After cheg his map agai off, on in hand. Still naked aside from a pair of sandals, he was very careful about where he held it.

  ***

  Jason looked at the well. It was a circle of bricks, the med and crumbling. There was a wooden bucket and k, both weathered with age. It was the kind of rustically picturesque feature he could imagine someoting at the tre of their hedge maze.

  Quest: [Stranger in a Strange Land]

  Objective plete: Explore the hedge maze 1/1.[Simple Pants] have been added to your iory.Quest plete.100 [Iron Spirit s] have been added to your iory.Jason gave a fist pump and took the pants out of his iory. They were made of pin white linen, with billowy legs and a very low crotch fit, held up by a drawstring.

  “It’s like a Mennonite made some hammer pants. Did I wake up in 1991 rural Pennsylvania?”

  Putting aside fashion s, Jason slipped the pants on, walking around experimentally They were suffitly roomy that it didn’t feel much different to walking around without them..

  “I don’t suppose I get a quest for some boxer shorts?”

  He waited hopefully for a few moments, but no windoeared.

  “Worth a try.”

  After being attacked by so many creatures, Jason was a mess of blood and oi, even if the wounds had been healed. The result was the white pants being immediately stained red and u-yellow.

  With his nudity ameliorated, Jason was able to turn his thoughts to other aspects of his situatio down on the edge of the well to think over his move.

  The things he was experieng were clearly impossible, which broadly pced him in one of two situations. One, his faculties were signifitly promised and his uanding of what he was doing was massively detached from the reality. Brain trauma, halluogens, some kind of severe mental break. His knowledge was too shallow and his observation point too subjective to make any definitive assessment. To the best of his uanding, though, none of those options made sense. He was too lucid, too capable of critical thinking. His sciousness wasn’t skipping around, glossing over the insistencies of a promised mental state. That being said, his uanding of mental ditions was essentially nil, so that might be what crazy felt like from the inside.

  The big point going for the mental-impairment hypothesis was that the alternative sario required Jason’s most fual uandings of reality to be somewhere between woefully inplete and breathtakingly wrong.

  Either way, his only real option was to get on with it. If it was all in his head, then it didn’t matter what he did. Inversely, if it was real, and he ran around ag like it wasn’t, the sequences could be dire. He took a deep, calming breath.

  “Alright, Jason” he said, steeling himself. “What’s ?”

  Sooner or ter he would o find his way out of the maze, but the fact that his quest ended on reag the well implied there was something special about it. He started by examining the wooden frame which had a simple k and rope to lower a bucket, along with a little wooden roof to shield the meism from the weather. It only seemed to have worked to a degree, with the rope and bucket both looking the worse for wear. The brickwork was likewise dipidated, with mortar crumbling at the touch. He stuck his head over the well to look down. To his surprise, irs had been affixed to the inside of the well, leading into darkness below.

  New Quest: [Secrets of the Well]

  You have discovered a dder desding into the well. Do you have the ce to explore the depths?

  Objective: Explore the well 0/1.Reward: Awakening stone.Bonus objective: Don’t die 0/1.Reward: Essence.“Don’t die? What kind of quest objective is don’t die?”

  He shook his head.

  “Fet that.”

  Reject quest [Secrets of the Well]?Jason was about to reject the quest when he heard voices ing from somewhere close within the hedge maze.

  “I tracked the aura of the mandrake that took my trowel,” a gravelly male voice said. “Someone had already killed it and my trowel was o be found.”

  “Someoh those adventurers we caught?” another man asked.

  “I don’t care who they’re with,” the first voice said. “I’m going to kill ‘em, cook ‘em a ‘em.”

  “I wao try some of that elf girl, but the mistress said we’re keeping them all for the sacrifice. Bloody waste, if you ask me.”

  “Nah, elves ain’t good eating. Not much meat on them, and what’s there is all stringy. That human girl, she’s the one you want. Lean and tender.”

  “I don’t know, Dougall; she looked pretty tough to me. And we always have humans. I just want a little variety, is all.”

  “Well, this lot is all spoken fardless.”

  Ducked down behind the well, Jason didn’t let out a breath until the voices faded into the distance. He ighe fact that they were talking about elves in the face of a casual discussion on the pros and s of eating people. Was that real, or just a couple of guys with a weird sense of humour?

  “ibals?”

  He gave it some sideration. Normally ibals would be right at the top of the crazy pile, but the day Jason was having, it was at least a familiar horror. Then he sidered it some more and started climbing down into the well.

  “What kind of lunatic pce is this?”

  Jason was not happy with his options. A quest with the explicit objective of ‘don’t die’ wasn’t great, but wandering blindly through a maze with ibals roaming about struck him as an even worse option. What was he going to do? Fight them off with their own trowel? There were two of them, and they were a lot bigger than a tyrannical pheasant. It might have been an evil monster chi, but it still barely came up to his waist. Eve got some savage pecks in. He didn’t have a on, so he had to get in behind, reach around and savagely choke the chi with both hands.

  Jason started residering his choice to go down the well when only the sed rung down shifted in his hand. It was set into the brickwork at the top, the shaky mortar apparently ready to give way. Thehought about himself hanging from a butcher’s hook a going.

  “Going down a creepy well or dodging ibals,” he muttered unhappily. For what felt like the huh time he wondered where he was, what was going on and what evil prick dumped him naked, right in the middle of it. The well was quite deep, judging from the diminishing light ing from above. He kept a careful grip on the etal rungs as the interior of the well became dank, the sides slid wet.

  “I’m definitely getting Legionnaire’s disease.”

  The light did not pee far down the narrow well, and Jason was soon moviirely by feel. He desded cautiously, each foot carefully seeking out the rung down. He would occasionally gnce up at the shrinking blue circle that was all he could see of the sky, reassuring himself it was still there.

  “Maybe they’re not really ibals,” he told himself. “Maybe they’re just talking themselves up.”

  Unvinced, he kept moving down into darkness, barely able to make out his hand on the rung in front of him. He discovered he had reached the bottom when his foot met water instead of the rung. Some experimental probing revealed it was ankle deep, enough to submerge his sandals in the icy cold. The bottom of the well was ft, but as it turned out, just as slippery as the walls. His feet slid out from under him and only his hands still gripping the rungs saved him from bashing his head against the side of the well. He ended up sprawled at the bottom of the well, dank water joining the blood and oi in staining his new pants.

  “Lovely.”

  The advantage of his low perspective was that he found himself looking directly at a slightly darker circle in the wall of what was already a very dark well. He reached out tentatively and found it was a hole, rge enough to crawl through. He didn’t know if it was the source of the well’s water or some kind of draiunnel.

  “No,” Jason said. “I’m definitely not ied in crawling in there.”

  Reject quest [Secrets of the Well]?“Sod off.”

  Jason looked up again at the bright circle of sky, then the dark circle of the tunnel. With a groaarted probing the pitch-bck hole with his hands.