NOVEL NEXT Chapter 73: Caldera
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Gordon: Do you ever feel like maybe your audience is, like, too familiar with you?
Marie: Parasocial viewerships build engagement. Even if it's a bit weird sometimes.
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Sol 497 FY 26, 03:22 Mars Time, Bonestell Crater Colony, Hab Layer, 9.32.002.B
It was basically a graph traversal puzzle, but with fifteen baddies each of whom was trying to undo your progress or kill you. The baddies were built to be difficult for Marie to handle—immune to fire and frost. Time spells worked fine, though, and dividing them vertically resulted in a climbing torso and thrashing legs.
They required line of sight to target, and seemed to be deaf, which was just as well.
The old gates were down, gone. The bars gaped like snaggled teeth.
Right through them, set in the floor in a circular depression was a smoldering brazier, the ghosts of a fire still burning, little more than coals.
The fog was thick, opaque, even. The depression in the floor led to a shallow trench which ran along the center of the hall, into the mist.
Marie's bandoleer of potions only had forty slots for the finger-sized potion vials she used most often, a double-row twenty long. She withdrew one and threw it, lighting a brazier (Brazier A, Gordon's suggestion), and the fog retreated down the hallway, empty archways overhead showing a velvet sky above through skeletal roof supports. Stairs going up were vaguely visible through the mist—as were two statues, misshapen yet ornate. They began to move.
19 ignition potions, 20 freezing potions left.
Gallant stepped forward and took the first rush on his shield. He was pushed backward several feet by the momentum, feet skidding on the floor and striking sparks.
Marie began her chant, memorized from long use, gesturing to direct the structure as it grew from her power source, her wand. Time shield, set in the air as a five-foot sphere, bisecting the rushing statue headed for her. The legs kept going, but the torso stayed behind, falling to the floor an instant later. Neither half seemed to be mobile without the other.
> ACatNamedMouse: Badass
Gallant's golem dug in his feet, driving them in a powerful sprint, shield striking edge-on under the statue's neck. The marble-like material cracked, spiderwebbing and with bits falling out, crumbling to powder. Gallant turned back to Marie, taking up a guarding position at her flank.
"Um, he forgot something," commented the newscaster.
The statue took two ponderous steps towards Marie as she lit the second brazier, immediately christened B by the more tactically inclined in the audience. On its second heavy step, its head fell off behind it.
The trenches from the second brazier seemed to climb the walls in little clay pipes, going up a level and through the wall to either side. The stairs had no such adornment, being just old, cracked stone stairs, now free of mist.
"Onward ho," said Gordon.
"Watch what you call me," Marie joked.
At the top of the stairs was another brazier, the tracks running to it from left and right.
This caused a momentary upset for the chat.
> Fizzben_the_Hazben: This is graph traversal
> Fizzben_the_Hazben: No edge between them, so no link. A->B is good, but the C's are whereever the wall climbing pipes go. This might be D or E. She's got to explore. Lighting them out of order might do something bad.
Marie snorted. It might just not work, and waste a potion. That'd be bad enough. For those keeping track at home, I'm down to 18 ignition potions.
> Randoon_the_wizard: Don't worry, we're keeping track
> Randoon_the_wizard: You've got like a million viewers—so that's like, me and Gordon, some of the best minds on the planet, and ... those other people.
> Big_Iron: No comment
> Big_Iron: I agree you probably need to explore, though. Anybody offering bets, right or left?
"I'm going left," Marie said over audio without waiting for an answer. Right is noisier.
> Urbanhousemoose: Good reasoning.
> ACatNamedMouse: So what's it like going to space, Big_iron?
> Big_Iron: Well, imagine you're in a car that's accelerating as fast as you can go. Sports car petal to the metal. It's like that, but for 33 miles, and you're wearing a flimsy little suit with an oxygen mask just in case the worst happens and you have to bail out. Which is super reassuring. Then, at about 32 miles into it, eight fusion cores start dumping nuclear fire at your six and you lose the ability to see for the next few minutes. From there it's oddly peaceful, you can see the world beneath you on the screens—no real windows, of course. You dock with the transport ship, which is like a hundred times bigger, and they make you sit there waiting for an hour. I made up time by calling my friend Harry. Um, that's AdonisRex.
> ACatNamedMouse: And now you're watching your girlfriend play computer games. Truth is stranger than fiction.
"Uh-huh."
Following the trench in the floor led to what seemed to be a wide open room, at least the sounds were more echoey. Further exploration led to a brazier with another T-junction of trenches, going left and right.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
> Fizzben_the_Hazben: Right should get you to a C brazier. Or maybe D. Let's say left is 1, so that's C1 or D1.
"Feels like I'm playing chess," whined Marie. "This is chess and I'm the pawn."
> x_TremeSnooze: FEEL BAD FOR ME I'M LEVEL 300
"At least you get to externalize all your processing," pointed out Gordon. Claire would have muted them by now.
The chat was generally in agreement that Frostiana did not brook wild mass guessing before she'd had time to think things through herself.
> Fizzben_the_Hazben: BOORING.
> ACatNamedMouse: But hot.
"Looks like it's C1," Marie decided, finally. "I'm lighting it."
> Randoon_the_Wizard: Daring but beautiful. Gordon is a lucky man.
> <3IHeartReal1sE>: How'd you two meet, lucky man?
> Big_Iron: WELL that's a story. Do you ... let me mute the chat for a sec, I'll let you know where we land on the 'sharing that with random people across the whole world' issue. B R B.
Gordon muted it such that she could hear him and nobody else could. "Well? It's not like it's a big secret."
"No it isn't," she agreed. "Plus it saves me telling my mom in person."
"You still haven't told your mom about us?" He performed shock and horror.
She laughed. Her laughter was getting more natural. Her stress was finally going down. Just another dungeon. Just another weekend. No stress.
"I promised her someone tall, dark, and handsome with killer abs," she said. "Sets her up for disappointment, but what are you gonna do."
"Crunches, I guess," he joked. "Alright, storytime."
> theKibbers: THEY'RE BACK
> <3IHeartReal1sE>: Storytime
Marie lit the brazier. As the mist pulled away, it revealed a little idol on the wall. Its eyes lit up with a sullen glow, and it extended a hand. "Looks like a lever," said Marie warily.
> Randoon_the_wizard:Who had lever of the evil god? Anyone?
> Randoon_the_wizard:Looks cursed.
> Randoon_the_wizard:Could be good?
"It's up to you, honey," said Gordon. "The wiki doesn't seem to cover this temple arena."
She pulled it.
The brazier went out with a hiss. She heard another hiss distantly in short succession.
Announcer: And that's a serious setback for Marie, now with only one brazier lit—A, for those paying attention—and 17 fire potions left!
> <3IHeartReal1sE>: I want to hear their meet-cute, dammit
"There's not—that—much to tell," Gordon said. "She's the wrong age for anybody on Mars—and I had a string of disappointing relationships with women who ended up very interested in my wallet, on account of my father—it got me kind of cynical. So we both ended up on MeetSweet, where anonymity comes first. We chatted for... oh, weeks, before we committed to sharing profiles. And we were both catfishing, and both said so. 'I'm like this, but I don't want you reverse-image-searching me until we have more in common...' and it didn't deter either of us, so we just kept bonding on commonalities. Don't know if you knew this, but coders and engineers have a lot of overlap in interests and daily gripes, etc. We got to where we didn't want to go more than a few hours without hearing from each other and decided to go steady pending the results of our actual profiles being shared, and I guess neither of us got scared off so here we are, eight months later."
> Randoon_the_wizard: Sniff it's beautiful
The studio camera cut out. On screen, her character was still looking around warily—her with a fizzing spell ready at the tip of her wand.
Gordon waited, but she didn't move. Seconds ticked by... 54... 55...
> x_TremeSnooze: Her audio's out too
The two of them commented in perfect microsecond synchronicity:
> Randoon_the_Wizard: Pee break.
> x_TremeSnooze: Pee Break!
Gordon burst out laughing. He couldn't help it.
"Marie?" he asked, still chuckling. His connection to her was different over the Q-link call—a different channel than the usual game audio. They were still connected.
Her voice came through flustered and a little impatient.
"Yes, Gordon?"
"Okay, I saw it. Just checking—your voice sounds echoey. Are you still in the VR pod?"
"Yes," she said, clipped. Cross. "What about it?"
Gordon hesitated. "...Are you peeing in a cup?"
She paused.
"You always make it sound so easy," she complained.
"I stream next to a bathroom, Marie..."
"When you talk about before, when you did longform PC streams."
"Marie—"
> x_TremeSnooze: Not that there's anything wrong with that, we know a delve is a one-shot long-haul, and you gotta do you. Don't fall in!
"I didn't want to have to take off the whole suit and go to the—Look, you can't use a bidet near VR equipment, okay? I'm not explaining myself to you."
That was more aggressive than normal.
"Marie, are you okay?"
"I'm embarrassed," she said. This time, her voice had lost the defensive irritation it had carried before. It was just soft. "Okay? Just embarrassed."
Gordon smiled, his tone gentle now.
"You don't have to be. You get to be whatever kind of Marie you are around me. Even the one peeing into a bottle. Or a cup."
"It's a thermos," she growled. "And I'm all done anyway. Don't tell anyone."
"I won't," he said. "I promise."
And he didn't.
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When she finally stepped into the sacrament chamber, the chat went silent. It was that kind of moment.
The smooth volcanic-glass wall before her was marred by deep rents, each a stroke, making up jagged letters:
"Harbinger of doom, erodes, fulfills, or flies
Trackless but tracked, multifarious guise'd
Ceaseless metanoid:
Herald of the Void"
> Urbanhousemoose: I think we found the boss door.
> Randoon_the_Wizard: Here we go.
The screen shimmered. A sphere rose from the temple floor—black, smooth, slowly rotating. It hovered in the air, perfectly still despite the wind.
Marie stepped forward. The mist was gone now, replaced by stillness.
"One more puzzle," she whispered.
Gordon said nothing.
The chat, for once, was silent too.