NOVEL NEXT Book 3 Chapter 10
"Alright, well, I'm ready," I said. "Everyone else?"
A chorus of affirmatives met my ears.
"I've slept with everyone but you and Emily," Summer- she'd said it was a reference to a different story she was fond of, which none of us had ever heard of- said. "Well, kinda-sorta."
After some careful inspection and testing, I'd ended up giving Summer the sword I'd taken from the Hellknight; I already had a trophy from that adventure, and the sword was safe to wield, for all that it had been forged and enchanted with demonic magics of death and decay. It had needed a sheath, but that wasn't a problem for me, and she now had a sturdy, sheet steel sheath with some leather padding hanging at her hip. At her other hip, on the other side of her belt, she had a new trio of sturdy leather pouches, each enchanted as bags of holding, and loaded with all sorts of useful adventuring supplies she might want.
"If I'm gonna get pregnant, it's gonna be from him," Talia said, pointing at me.
"What, are you ovulating right now?" I asked sarcastically, quirking an eyebrow.
"Uh, yeah?" Talia asked, folding her arms. "Why do you think I suddenly got so much hornier this last winter?"
I blinked a few times. That was- what the- oh, goddammit. Of course. Lysander had mentioned 'heat,' hadn't he? It was one of those details of elven anatomy that I had managed to forget- elven women might only ovulate once a decade, but they stay like that for a whole year. And Talia was... I mean, the age of an elven woman's first ovulation varied from person to person, but eighteen was supposed to be a perfectly reasonable age for that.
Fuck, someone had told me this before, haven't they?
"I told you when I first realized, remember?" Talia continued. "I said that, for the next year or so, I was gonna be really horny, and that I might say or do some stuff we both regret, and that, if you were gonna give up on the Mage-Knight thing with me, I needed you to use protection so I don't get pregnant."
I stared blankly ahead, as I remembered a conversation that I hadn't been paying much attention to at the time, because I was a shitty boyfriend.
"So anyways," Faith said, forging valiantly ahead. "Summer's picked up some abilities from all of us, including some basic Druidcraft and some martial arts- a lot more martial arts than we were able to teach her in just two weeks naturally, which is nice. Volex also gave her some more Occult stuff, although... Summer, what all did you get again?"
"Shapeshifting and Bardic Knowledge," Summer said. "Apparently Bards can use Occult magic to feed them information that they could plausibly know, and since everyone knows Bards tend to know all sorts of random trivia... Well. I bet that'll get a lot of use."
"It really is a cornerstone of any Bard's skillset," Volex said.
"Alright, well, let's just go tell Helen we're ready, alright?" I said.
"No need," Volex said. "This was while you were out, but Professor Takeda is going to be managing The Abyss, and she'll know when we're ready, so we just have to show up."
I grunted. "Well, let's go then, if we're all ready."
---
"Welcome, children," Professor Takeda said, as we entered the weirdly rustic-looking sub-basement where the entrance to The Abyss was kept. The floor was all cobblestone, and the walls were mostly cobblestone, interrupted by regularly-spaced pillars of dark, aged, and thick timbers that connected to the rafters- the ceiling wasn't stone, but it was still rather old-fashioned timberwork that felt out-of-place in a building people still used regularly. "I have your assignment here, and I'd like to take a few moments to go over it with you, and answer any questions you might have. Your goal in The Abyss is simple: descend through ten levels of challenges, and retrieve an ancient artifact that Archmage Helen Rosewood herself cast down into The Abyss. Any questions?"
Well, that was short. I guess she wanted us to ask a lot of questions, but... I mean, c'mon, there's some information you could've reasonably assumed we wanted to know.
"Why did Helen throw it down there in the first place?" Talia asked. "And what is the artifact?"
"It is a type of magical item called an Oracle," Takeda explained. "The defining characteristic of Oracles is that they are capable of independently performing divination magic- usually in response to questions asked of them by people, but some historically-notable examples have a will of their own, which gave them their name- usually used to refer to humanoid diviners."
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"Can you be more specific about what the artifact looks like?" I asked.
Professor Takeda snapped her fingers, conjuring an illusion of the artifact in question in midair, which slowly rotated so we could see it from multiple angles.
"It is a glass vessel," Professor Takeda described, "with a roiling green storm inside of it. It possesses a looped handle, a flat base upon which to rest, and a tapered protrusion, from which emerges the answers to any question it is asked."
"Kinda looks like a teapot," Summer said.
"Yeah, honestly, that looks almost exactly like a glass teapot," I said. "I mean, that little bulge at the top looks like a lid that's just... Fused in place, so you can't open it."
"You are free to your interpretation," Professor Takeda said sagely.
"How long is this going to take?" Faith asked.
"From the perspective of the outside world, it will be only an hour at the most," Professor Takeda said. "From your perspective, however, it will be between five and nine days. Do you need to pack more rations?"
"I've got a month's worth of those travel rations from the commissary," I said, patting one pocket. "I've also got a few bottles of spices, because they don't taste great."
"Good, that should keep morale high," Professor Takeda said, nodding seriously. "There are Occult techniques for improving the taste of food, which I highly recommend you learn if you do not already know them, but I will concede that they are rather low-priority. Any other questions?"
"What kind of challenges will we be facing?" Emily asked.
"Seeing as I am the one proctoring The Abyss right now, it will mostly be puzzles and scavenger hunts," Professor Takeda said. "There will, however, be a few martial challenges, which Summer is expected to be capable of facing on her own. By all means, intervene and save her if she seems to be in genuine danger, but... Do give her a chance to solve it on her own, yes?"
"Listen, guys, I understand the importance of a learning experience, but I do not give a fuck," Summer said, nervously. "Shit goes down, I want you to help, okay?"
"Aw, Summer, don't worry," I said, reaching over and playfully tousling her hair. "You'll live."
A bead of sweat formed on Summer's forehead.
"If that's all the questions you have?" Professor Takeda asked, half-turning to tap a few buttons on a little console I hadn't noticed before. On the back wall, in a gap in the pattern of timbers, the fabric of reality tore, forming a near-circular portal with messy, ragged edges, and some slight corners at the top and bottom.
"How does this whole thing work, anyhow?" Talia asked.
"Volex can explain," Professor Takeda said. "In you go, children."
And with a snap of her fingers, irresistible magic picked us up and threw us through the portal, and into The Abyss.
---
"Alright, first room seems safe," I said carefully, after going over it with some trap-finding divinations. "Everyone's alright? That wasn't a soft landing, and the floor's pretty hard."
The first room of the first floor of The Abyss was big and open, with a locked door just behind us and a locked door on the far side of the room. The floor and walls were cobblestone, just like that sub-basement, and the ceiling was... well, very shadow-y and hard to see, but a simple handheld spotlight revealed it to be basic, unassuming wood planking with reinforcing rafters.
In the center of the floor was a simple puzzle that I knew and loathed: three wide, circular platforms set in a line, one of which had a golden emblem on its side. At the other end, another platform had a stack of ten disks of stone, each one smaller than the one below it.
"I'm alright," Summer said. "What is... The hell is that?"
"A classic pseudo-puzzle called the Towers of Mordecai," I said. "The rules are simple: you can only move one disk at a time, the only valid move is taking the topmost disk from a stack and setting it on another stack or an empty platform, and you can't put larger disks on top of smaller disks. And the goal is to move that stack from the lefthand platform to the righthand platform, which has a golden emblem on it."
"Huh," Summer said. "Wait, pseudo-puzzle?"
"Even I know this one, and I don't do logic puzzles for fun," Talia said. "It's a simple pattern that you repeat over and over again, no matter how many disks there are. The only thing that matters is whether the number of disks is odd or even, and whether you care which platform the disks end up on."
"Yeah, there's no actual solving, here," I said, shaking my head. "The worst part is, for every disk you add to the stack, the number of moves you have to make doubles. For a stack of ten disks? It's gonna take us a thousand moves to finish this thing."
"Well, it's not gonna get any more solved by standing around complaining," Summer said, swaggering over to the stack. "So which platform do I put the first one on?"
"The middle platform," I said.
"Cool." She clambered up the stack, until she stood on the third largest disk, and laid hands on the smallest disk. She grunted with effort, her arms straining... and then, with a loud grunt, followed by a loud curse, she managed to budge the stone about an inch. "...A little help here? This thing is heavy!"
"This is gonna be our whole day, isn't it?" Faith asked, listlessly.
"Eyup," I said, nodding. "And here I was thinking I was paranoid for packing a collapsible gantry crane. Alright, Summer, c'mere, we're gonna do this properly, and I need every pair of hands I can get for this."
Summer huffed, as she made her way over to us. "Man, this is bullshit. Why they build a dungeon like this?"
"Well, it is hard, isn't it?" I asked, as I started pulling steel beams out of my pocket. "Alright, bolt this one to that one, okay? We'll be done with this soon enough."