NOVEL NEXT 84 - Magical Key(card)s
Archmund swept his eyes across the room before the entrance hall.
It was a reception room, but no one manned the reception desk made of black granite, shining faintly blue with the reflected light from the massive false window. There were couches. Before he could utter a word of warning, Beatrice and Rory each flopped down in one, stretching and lounging.
"Is that safe?" Mary whispered to him. Frankly, he had no idea.
He walked behind the reception desk, looking for a manual override switch or something, throwing open drawers that were inexplicably there.
Well, it wasn't that much weirder than cabinets.
There were two shining objects in the cabinet, glowing a cyan that was all too familiar, not the cyan of the false sky but something he'd seen all the time all the same—
"Granavale," Gelias's voice came, sharply, "be careful—"
His fingers brushed against a small flat rectangle of Gem, and his magic burst forth as if from a dam, suffusing it.
"What do you have there?" Mary said. She leaned over besides him, reaching into the drawer, and another Gemstone Keycard flashed money-green.
"Of that," Gelias said, sounding defeated. "Be careful of those things."
Archmund pulled his hand out of the cabinet and looked at the Gemstone artifact. As he watched, the Gemstone twisted and refracted. A portrait of his face appeared upon it. Besides him, Mary gasped.
"It's like a mirror!"
A coldness filled the pit of his stomach. He'd been hoping, as they'd gone deeper, that his familiarity with this place was coincidence. Paradoiela, the tendency to see patterns where none existed. Plenty of buildings had nice atriums and opening rooms. Plenty of nobles had indoor fountains and large libraries. Plenty of cities in this world had many dense buildings.
"Any more of those?" Beatrice said, jumping up from the couch. Archmund shook his head.
"Hey, you snooze, you lose, Betty," Rory said.
"Guess we're both losers."
But a keycard? A small piece of material that showed who he was and gave him access to deeper levels of the building?
Either this was the multiverse's weirdest form of convergent evolution, or there was something deeper afoot.
He held his keycard up against the black sensor box next to the door.
It brought him no joy when the box beeped, flashed green, and clicked the lock open.
To Archmund's surprise, the Dungeon beyond the frosted door actually did resemble a cubicle farm. Rows of drab boxes meant to isolate their occupants, giving them "focus", but threatening interruption at any time.
He stepped up to one of the boxes, running his hand along the walls. It was cool and stone-rough to the touch. Really, he was overthinking things. If anything, these were prison cells, not cubicles.
Prison cells with no doors and no locks, with desk and chairs in each of them.
Right. Definitely prison cells.
But the corridor was wider than a prison. Wider than an office, for that matter. There was room for the five of them to walk their way down with space to spare.
"I can't believe you got some new fancy gear like that already," Beatrice said. "I'm going to see if I can get any like it. I bet it'll sell for a lot. Rory, come with me."
Rory nodded like a little puppy — they had the strangest dynamic — and started following her.
"I really would advise caution here," Gelias said, following after them. "Really. Come on, even if—"
Mary made to go after him, but Archmund grabbed her cloak. "Archie?"
"Not yet."
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He pulled out his Gemstone Keycard. "Show me yours?"
Mary held hers before his face. Hers glowed a faint lime green, the exact shade of American paper money, which was really weird since the Omnio Empire used coins or promissory notes for money. But he was probably imagining it since it had been decades since he'd seen American paper money. He saw her portrait on it, mirroring her face almost perfectly.
He raised his hand to touch it, and then paused. "May I?"
She smirked. "Oh, now you ask."
He took her Keycard in his hand and noticed, with some surprise, that her magic was rather well-contained in it. It wasn't, in any sense of the world, intimate. There was a workplace-appropriate distance between his magic and hers in her keycard, rather unlike how they'd mingled their magics when he'd made his first fumbles into mastering his Ruby of Light. He could get a sense of her, but he only recognized the nuances of the magic as hers because were so close.
Ah, so long ago.
He flicked his eyes up, making sure that Gelias, Beatrice, and Rory were too far to see them, and then he whipped out his Gemstone Tablet and tapped Mary's Keycard to it.
With a soft chime, like the tinkling of crystal, his Tablet's screen rippled like water — and a stat sheet pulled up.
Strength: 7
Dexterity: 7
Constitution: 7
Intelligence: 8
Wisdom: 7
Charisma: 8
Luck: 5
Titles:
Granavale Maid
Champion of Granavale
Noble-in-training
Skills:
Begone!
Hands Off!
Relationships:
Archmund Granavale, Contractual Master, Friend (?)
Gelias Greenroot, ???
Beatrice Blackstone, ???
Rory Redmont, ???
???
Bound Items:
Gemstone Handfan
Gemstone Keycard: Attunement 100%. Reservoir 10/10.
It was fuller and far more detailed than the one he'd seen earlier by brute-force touchscreening his way into her stat screens.
"I get the feeling," Mary said, "that I'm not supposed to be seeing that."
"Honestly, Mary? We've broken so many laws together. What's one more on top of those?"
She smirked, bemused. "It's a little scary to see my own name written out on a Gemstone artifact, though. Next to all those numbers? Hard to tell what to make of it."
That was a limitation he hadn't considered. Subliteracy. Mary only could read as well as she did because he'd gone out of his way to teach her. A System Interface, like his Gemstone Tablet, was only useful to someone who could interpret it.
Maybe it was safe to show to peasants after all, except then they'd gossip and tell nobles and then his life would be in actual danger.
"It's probably best that we don't talk about this with them," he said., nodding towards the nobles "How about we catch up while they're exploring up ahead? We've probably got a few minutes."
—————
"Gotcha!" Beatrice said, pouncing forward onto a desk. She triumphantly held up two small Gemstone rectangles, which instantly became a deep purple, so dark they were almost black.
Rory smiled, pained. She was always like this. Meanwhile, Gelias frowned.
"You should be careful with those," he said. "No good ever comes of artifacts that cleave to their wielders at first touch."
"You're taking this way too seriously," Beatrice said. "Rory, catch!"
She threw one of her cards to him. It felt like her, like having to watch to make sure she didn't accidentally run into the highlands to try and hunt a bear or the knowledge that she was spying on him from behind a tree when he was doing his training drills.
He caught it, but the color stayed deep purple. He could feel her power, like the essence of their sparring, in the card.
"I think this is all yours, Betty," he said.
"Well, that's too bad," she said. "You can hold on to it for me, I guess. Seems like these are the only useful bits of junk around here. From the way my cousin was talking, you'd expect the loot from here to be, well, useful."
She said the words my cousin with dismissive contempt but also envy. Rory didn't blame her. A year ago, Archmund Granavale had been nobody, a recluse, sheltered, never present whenever nobles gathered. Now, he was comparable to nobles raised in the Imperial Capital.
"The good loot comes from Monsters," Gelias said. "Everyone knows that. We're lucky any of this stuff is usable at all. If anything, it's too easily usable. Like an obvious trap."
"So you don't want them if we get any more. That's fine with me. Rory, you grab the next ones."
As much as she annoyed him sometimes, he could tell she was thinking of him in her own way.
—————
Archmund and Mary caught up to Beatrice, Gelias, and Rory after they'd gathered a bunch of looted items.
Archmund looked upon them warily, his concern rising as he assessed each piece. There were mugs with weird logos on them — no, they were probably tankards. There were lanyards, perfectly suited for holding ID cards — no, they were just loops of rope. There were cloth caps — ok, those were perfectly normal. Probably.
"But all of this stuff is… well, it's junk," Beatrice said.
"May I?" Archmund said.
"If you count it towards your loot tax, sure."
Archmund touched a mug, probing it with his magic. He could tell these were unfriendly to foreign magics — they would resist Attunement, and therefore would always be tricky to 'master'. His magic flowed through easily but didn't linger. He could sense crystal structures similar to his Ruby of Energy, but slightly twisted.
From that far and ineffable space he called his power and sent a pulse through the mug. He waved his hand over it.
It was heated.
There was another set of crystalline circuits within the mug, almost inverse to the first. He sent his magic through those, and touched his hand to the mug again.
And now it was chilled.
A mug that could keep liquids hot or cold. How miraculous and wonderful. Truly, his companions seemed to think the same, for they stood in dumbfounded silence.
"Seems like a neat party trick," Rory said, after a minute.
"It's junk," Beatrice said. "We have chefs and iceboxes for that."
Archmund ignored her. She was missing the potential of easy food preservation and the culinary applications, because she was a normal child, unlike him. Either way there were two other types of artifacts to test.
"I'm telling you, it's junk!" Beatrice said, hotter this time. "So stop wasting your time and let's hunt for more of these cards!"
Well, now he just had to investigate.