49: Rube Would Be Proud

I woke with a groan and tried to push my way up out of bed. I failed, and for multiple reasons. First and foremost, someone’s arms were wrapped tight around me. Second, I was all tangled up in my clothes, and third… I wasn’t in my bed.

Paisley groaned from beneath me, and I realised what was happening with a sudden and very mortified rush of memory. I was in my smol form, and Paisley was… well, her normal size. I was being used as a human plushie!

“What the—” she mumbled, looking down at me. I wonder whose face turned redder, hers or mine.

“Oh crap, I’m so sorry!” she squealed, throwing me out of her lap like I was the proverbial hot potato. Except there was nobody there to catch me, so I sailed through the air of my apartment living room.

The wall was coming up fast, and in a frantic effort to dodge it, I performed a Ribbon Roll. In the corner of my vision, a warning about using abilities while hungover popped up. So, of course, my spell misfired, sending me in the complete wrong direction. Elena, who’d been coming down the stairs from her bedroom partition to see what all the racket was about, got a tiny squeaking fairy to the face.

On the other sofa, Noah and Ethan had been in a similar predicament to Paisley and I, all thanks to a dare from the girl whose face I’d just hit. Noah was in flight now too, although his journey wasn’t an involuntary one like mine was.

“Elena, you—!” he yelled, his voice like a tiny enraged chipmunk.

We hit each other in midair. Me falling away from Elena’s face while she swore loudly, nursing a broken nose, while he’d been on the warpath. Heroically, Paisley dove to catch me before I met the ultimate endpoint of my little pinball rally—the floor. Just like a sad little pinball, though, I went between her hands while they flailed uselessly in the air. To make matters worse, she’d been off balance in a half-dive to catch me, which meant that now she would come down right on top of me.

Right beside us, Ethan had one of his hands wrapped tightly around Noah, who was throwing harmless bolts of light magic at Elena while she pulled a healing potion from her pocket. Our priestly healer took a step backwards to put further distance between the irate pixie in his hand and the architect of all this chaos, my roommate.

His foot hit Paisley as she rolled to keep from flattening me. I saw the whole thing like it was in slow motion. He toppled, his immense height working with gravity like some sort of conniving tag team. Noah’s angry little squeals were replaced with a tiny cry of surprise that dopplered through the air until he hit the top of the library door frame with a thunk.

Falling with his arms and wings flailing, he was not prepared for the same door and its frame to follow him down. Something had come unlatched, and now the whole damn thing was slowly toppling towards the ground.

Ethan got there in time, diving to grab the smaller boy before tucking into a roll that almost had him braining himself on the wall. The door hit the floor with a loud, jarring, bang, that caused everyone to flinch despite the fact it hadn’t hit anyone.

Several seconds of stunned silence descended on the whole room as the insane Rube Goldberg machine came to a final stop. We stared at the door, then each other, then towards Elena, and finally… at the space on the wall where there should have been a hole into the library. Nothing but blank, plastered wall met our utterly dumbfounded gazes.

“Where… where is the library?” Elena asked in a nasally voice. She had a tissue stuffed up her nose.

“On the floor, I think,” Ethan groaned, making sure he still had the sulking boy pixie in his hands.

Noah, who was calming down, pointed a very small finger up at our rogue. “You owe us all a… shit, I forgot what it was you had to do for that dare…”

“I’m pretty sure the return dare was that she had to let you and Keiko fly her up and then drop her into a lake,” Paisley said helpfully, a mischievous glint in her dark brown eyes.

“I want to know why the little wasp wanted to attack me,” Elena said with a grin. I bet this chaos was fuelling her on a deep and intimate level of her soul.

“I was only going to poke your nose angrily,” Noah grumbled. “I wasn’t attacking you.”

“The nose that was bleeding?” Elena asked. “Rude.”

“Guys,” Ethan interrupted with a frustrated growl. “The library is on the floor. I think that’s a little more pressing and, dare I say it, more interesting than who was going to aggressively boop who.”

“Right,” Noah said, and we all turned our attention back to the very strange door.

“Do you think it still opens to the library?” I asked the room at large. “Did we like, break the game’s apartment systems?”

Beside me, Paisley had shifted to sit up, rubbing the shoulder that had been her first point of contact with the floor as she fell. “I guess I’ll use my high level inspection skill.”

She shared the notification with the rest of us as she did so, and we all took a moment to read over the strange object in front of us.

Mysterious Door - Architectural ComponentA door without a home, this isn’t just a portal in the mundane sense. It contains so many stacked enchantments that it is impossible to tell one from another, or what their individual purposes are. As a practitioner of the necromantic arts, you can tell that there are powerful bindings that interact in some way with the natural cycle of death and rebirth.

“Well, that’s not something I’ve seen before,” Ethan mused after everyone took a minute to digest the door’s description.

“An enchanted door that leads to the same room no matter where it’s installed…” I muttered, standing up and returning to normal size. “Mum is going to love this.”

“I’m going to test it,” Noah declared, and while still in tiny form, flew over and heaved the door open.

Like some sort of kid’s TV comedy skit, we all peered over the edge of the doorway and down into the library, which was still in exactly the same condition as we’d last seen the place. Books were still haphazardly stacked on shelves, the desk was still wedged into what little wall space there was between all the shelves, and the dust that sat over everything hadn’t budged. It appeared that gravity was taking a day off after the clusterfuck it’d produced a minute prior.

“That is so fucking weird,” Elena remarked.

A thought occurred to me, and I looked up and glanced at each of my friends. “You know, if this isn’t attached to the apartment, then we could move it to the Inn.”

“Sounds like a great idea,” Noah said with a wry grin. “Just throw the extremely powerful unknown artifact door into our nice new inn that is already attached to a giant talking tree that uses the word meat way too often.”

“Nah, that’s how the most interesting stuff happens,” I replied. “You’ve got to cause problems for the devs, make them get a little creative. Who knows, maybe we’ll get something really good out of this.”

“Or we’ll just create a giant carnivorous tree with a bottomless interdimensional stomach.”

“Yeah, twinkerbell, but then we get to kill it and see what loot it drops,” I winked, nudging my friend with an elbow.

“Ow,” he complained when his tiny form was punted a few feet through the air. Of course, with the PvP protections, he didn't actually take real damage. Elena definitely had though, thanks to our… unique interpersonal settings.

“I doubt the door would interact with anything outside of it,” Paisley commented, appearing beside me like she’d just phased into existence. I gave a start of surprise and looked up to meet her gaze. Stop. Bad heart. Now was not the time to get fancy with your rhythm.

Elena asked a question, which I think was directed at Paisley, but my stupid brain was distracted by a certain warm scent that had a hint of warm citrus in it today.

“Yeah, I think you’re right,” Paisley nodded.

“Sorry, I was distracted,” I said, and when I saw a smirk on Elena’s face, I had to scowl so I didn’t blush. My friend knew me too well. “What did you say?”

“I said,” she grinned, “That there’s probably way more going on inside that library than meets the eye.”

“There’s no player maker’s mark in the tooltip,”  Paisley mused, oblivious to Elena’s amusement and my discomfort. “If it was just a cute little dimensional library, it would just say that. There is definitely something strange going on with this door and the library.”

“I’m surprised you weren’t able to get more info, Pay. Your inspection skill is incredibly high level.” Ethan said, kneeling to touch the worn wood of the frame. Watching my excessively tall lanky friend crouch down was like watching a redwood fold itself in half.

“Which means this door is really rare, or really powerful, or both,” she said.

“Definitely both.”

“Let’s stand it back up and check the library more thoroughly to see if it’s okay in there,” Paisley declared after a moment.

All of us worked together to place the doorway back where it’d been latched previously, then carefully opened it. Nothing appeared to be out of place, just like when we opened it on the floor. Crowding inside, it became very obvious that the room was indeed completely fine.

“This can’t be all there is,” said Ethan, running his fingertips over the books.

Noah, frowning from beside the taller boy, began to pull books off the shelves at random. “Maybe it’s like a secret lever thing?”

“I wouldn’t bet against the idea,” I said, following his lead.

Soon everyone was busy pulling on the books, lamps, and even the bookshelves themselves. Nothing happened, and just as quickly as we’d started, we gave up.

"It has to be a magical switch then," Paisley declared. "An incantation or a code phrase. Maybe I’ll be able to see the door if it’s enchanted?”

“Open sesame!” Elena shouted, almost immediately after the death bard was done speaking.

“Mellon!” Noah called a moment later, turning a surreptitious smirk my way.

I rolled my eyes.

To absolutely nobody’s surprise, the goofballs’ attempts to open the way didn’t work.

Then, a thought occurred to me. If this place wasn’t created by the mysterious WhisperWord, then it stands to reason that they also didn’t create any of the hypothetical clues or entrances further into the library. Rellithesh was very particular about labelling player made goods as an incentive to crafters to make and sell the best items they possibly could. It also meant that this room would be littered with things created by its previous owner, none of which would be the solution to our problem, although they might hold clues.

“Hey everyone, search for ownership tags on the books,” I said. “If my hunch is right, we might find—”

Greetings, players of Rellithesh! In five days, the wards protecting the newly discovered lands of Aimashii Duthaich will weaken! However, dark forces have lain in wait, preparing for this moment. They stand both at the border and in the shadows much closer to home. Be on your guard, adventurers, for the safety of the Unveiled Realms is not as sure a thing as it once was…

“Oh fuck,” Elena blurted, with mirroring sentiments voiced by the rest of the group.

“That is extremely ominous…” I said slowly, putting down a book I’d been about to inspect. “Does anyone else feel like we should be going out to the tree to make sure it’s not on fire or something?”

“Very much so,” Ethan agreed quickly. “Let’s get a move on people, the mysteries of the library can wait.”

At that very moment, mum came flying into the room looking like she’d just mainlined a litre of caffeine. “Time to go! Things are happening.” She said, singing the last word.

“Is the tree okay?” I asked worriedly.

“Oh, the tree is fine! Awake, mind you, but fine,” she reassured us. “I hear that there’s some strange mist back at Ardgour, though. We should check it out.”

“Lead the way, mum.”