79: Lore Nerds are Cute

I half expected Mheitai to jump out and explain herself after Paisley asked that rather poignant question. There was no sudden apparition, however. Just silence.

“I don’t know why Mheitai lured us here, but she’s not your typical NPC. She knows we’ll just respawn, so any physical attack is useless,” I said, trying to reason out her motives as I spoke. “Her goal is probably related to getting information, although I don’t know why a bunch of lore would be of interest to her either. I think… I think in this case, we were tools, not enemies.”

“Great,” Paisley muttered. “I love being the tool of some erratic NPC who treats the fourth wall like a doorway.”

With a laugh, I reached out and squeezed her forearm, then gestured to the spot on the wall where she had mentioned a door might be. “Let’s see what else we can find in here, yeah?”

We approached the section of wall that Paisley had pointed out with a healthy dose of caution. The last door had been… vicious.

It became quickly obvious that her hunch had been correct, though— there was definitely a door there. Question was, how did we open it?

My first suggestion was to poke it with my sword, just to see if there were any traps, but Paisley vetoed that idea. Instead, we worked with a theory she came up with— since these were probably ascendant fae like me, the handle would be down lower. At first we also thought that the top would be a good place to look, but then I remembered that growing wings was only one path that a seelie fae could take to ascend.

So, crouching low in case of traps, we felt along the wall for switches, handles, or whatever else might be around. Pretty soon, we found one.

“Here!” I said excitedly, my fingers wrapping around a board, through a gap between it and its neighbour. I could feel a metal handle up almost flush with the plank, and I pulled it.

Both of us crouched just a little lower as a clockwork whirring, ticking sound came from behind the wall. A few seconds passed, but still the door didn't open. Paisley and I exchanged confused looks—

Whoosh. A massive blade swept down from the ceiling like a farmer's scythe coming in to reap his harvest. It missed our heads by two feet, maybe less, and then disappeared back into its nest above us.

“Wow,” Paisley said, with a laugh that briefly rose up into the realm of mania. “Okay. Wrong lever.”

I shook my head. A thought had just occurred to me. “That ticking, whirring sound? I think we need to pull a second handle or something before the timer runs out. If we're tall and we fail… decapitation.”

“That makes a lot of sense. Let's keep looking, then,” said Paisley, eyeing the ceiling with trepidation.

Our search took another few minutes, but soon we had a second handle, this time behind a board on the opposite side of the door. With a coordinated nod, we pulled both, and sure enough, a door swung inwards.

“Phew,” I said. “Now let's hope there aren't any more.”

“That is probably more of a possibility now, since you said it aloud,” Paisley said, giving me a look. “I'm not being superstitious, either. There's someone with dev privileges watching us. She might add more just to fuck with us.”

“She totally would,” I sighed, then waved the possibility away. “Except that this place is more of a lore side dungeon— a non-respawning area. Did you see the metalworking bench? Somebody has been here before, and this area hasn't reset.”

While most areas of the game would work to heal back into a dev-approved state—like Ardgour probably was after the big siege—some regions wouldn't respawn. Any looting or damage the players did to the area would stick around indefinitely. Which actually raised another question— if they didn't spring the traps, how did the previous person get in?

“True, true,” Paisley nodded, oblivious to my sudden confusion. “Anyway, let's see inside.”

I nodded, but my gaze drifted back to the first door we entered. Had… had Mheitai reset the traps, just to mess with us? That felt like the most logical explanation for how someone else could've been through here, while also having the traps ready when we did.

Meanwhile, beyond the door we'd just opened, we found a hallway with doors leading off either side, and at the end, a larger living room could be seen. Moving carefully inward, we began to investigate.

The doors on either side opened into small bedrooms, although none had anything interesting in them— or, they didn't have anything in them now. Our predecessor had clearly looted everything worth taking already.

As for the living room, it was fairly barebones. Old, meticulously crafted furniture was arranged in a pleasing way around a small hearth. A few old cooking utensils sat on shelves, along with a few sprigs of long dead herbs.

The most interesting thing about the room was the jagged hole in one wall. Splintered wood lay all across the floor where it had come to rest after something smashed its way into the room from outside.

Bending down, I picked up a larger splinter and ran my thumb over the jagged tip. “Well, whatever made this hole is probably also the reason for why this place was abandoned.”

“Yeah…” Paisley said absently as she leaned into the hole. “It looks like the dirt fell down into a cave and something crawled up the hole.”

Looking down there with her, I saw that she was right. “Do we go down?”

“I guess so. We've come all this way, after all.”

Reaching the bottom of the hole, we found ourselves in an extremely odd cave. For one thing, the floor was at such an eccentric angle that it was almost impossible to walk on. A lot of the cave was covered in the rocky soil from collapse further up, but the rest was a pretty normal cave.

It was made of a yellow-white stone of some kind that seeping water had partially carried with it, creating stalagmites and stalactites. Light from my belt-mounted lamp stone danced through the cave, using all the odd mineral formations as shadow puppets.

“This is a cool cave,” Paisley whispered, her voice echoing despite her attempt to keep quiet. “Look at the weird patterns in the calcium carbonate deposits.”

She was pointing to a spot on the melty looking stone where there used to be something that had since decayed away. The partially filled depression was vaguely cylindrical, and about as wide as the length of my forearm.

“That's… cool?” I offered after a second or two of staring. It was a pretty interesting feature, but in the end it was just a bunch of minerals.

Paisley was unperturbed, and she pointed further down the long diagonal cave. “Look, there's heaps of them. I wonder what used to be in here.”

The answer to her question was revealed when we progressed further, to a section with a floor that wasn't blind drunk.

Stuck in one of the stalagmites was a small section of partially mummified, partially fossilised, mostly decayed wood. My earlier lukewarm attitude to the cave changed, because like, seeing a chunk of tree that had been partially preserved was pretty damn cool.

“Okay, I know like, next to nothing about geology, but this is really fascinating,” Paisley said, brushing some of her wildly waving hair behind an ear while she crouched to look at the old petrified tree.

Oh, wow. The way the light from my lantern caught her jawline and cheekbones… god damn, she was beautiful. Seeing her get all nerdy over rocks was really adorable, too— expression all earnestly intent, with a tiny smile of wonder pulling at her lips. I had to swallow a giant lump in my throat and very forcibly turn my attention back to the rocks.

“This whole place must've been a forest at some point,” she said, glancing around. “Before it was gobbled up by the earth, I mean.”

“Yeah,” I said, unsure of how else to contribute.

“Let's keep going!” She said suddenly, springing back to her feet with a grin. “I want to see where the cave leads.”

It kept going, getting smaller and smaller, until suddenly it hit a wall. A wall with a large, suspiciously square hole in it.

Taking out an enchanted light stone of her own, she held it out through the hole so we could see inside. Initially, it appeared to just be more of the cave, until we saw how square the cave was. Then, we began to see the artfully carved stone bricks. Over the centuries, the limestone of the mountains had attempted to hide everything under a layer of that calcium carbonate stuff that Paisley mentioned— but it hadn't had enough time to more than partially hide the truth.

“It's a ruin,” I gasped. “A really, really old ruin.”

“It can't be human— didn't that god, Rasmerim the Earthfather, suddenly teach the nomadic humans how to build and plant crops like fifteen hundred years ago?” Paisley asked. I shrugged in response, but she nodded to herself without looking at me. “Yeah, he saw all the other races with their civilizations and decided to help the humans.”

“So…” I said, staring down into the ancient room. “Then this place must be fae, right? They're the only other people around here.”

“Gotta be,” she nodded. “But old fae— older than the Ascendant Empire.”

I couldn't help it, I leapt down through the gap, sliding across the damp stone floor when I landed. Buzzing my wings for a second helped me keep my balance.

“Has lore really always been this exciting?” I asked, when Paisley joined me.

“Yes, Keiko, it really has…” She laughed, then suddenly slipped and wobbled on her feet, threatening to fall over.

I grabbed her hand and steadied her, and she laughed again. “Fuckin’— Sometimes, I feel as graceful as a duck on roller skates around you.”

“It's okay,” I said, smiling wryly. “I think it's cute.”

“Shush,” she said, swatting lightly at my arm. “Flattery will not work on me.”

I grinned. “I know— you’d never believe it. Baked goods, though… if I learn to bake, you'll fold like— well, like you would've just now if I didn't catch you.”

“Rude!”