Hm. A bedroom, apparently.

She based this assumption on the expansive four-poster bed situated directly in front of her face, hung generously with gauzy canopy and piled high with stuffed animals. An end table, fashioned from white polished marble, flanked it on one side, and a similarly crafted dresser was tucked against the other. Cloth drapes decorated the walls, giving the stone room a bit of added softness, and behind her, Red was sprawled out, one foot still caught over…

A person?

No, a body, Sláine realized, noting the knife jutting out of its back and the blood pooled thick around its torso. Red was staring at it, frozen in place with a single hand reached out towards the white-haired form, before she flinched and heaved herself up.

“Fucking asshole,” Red seethed, lashing out at the bed with the toe of her boot. It worked about as well as one might expect considering the frame was made of stone.

While Sláine was baffled, certain things took precedence. “[ Bind Break ],” she muttered, and then — with an odd, humming feeling that coursed over her skin — the webbing around her melted away. It was followed up with another blunt command: “[ Threat Detection ].”

…Nothing obvious happened, and Sláine sort of wished these abilities came with a tutorial or something. Was that normal? Was everything functioning correctly? How would threats even register to her? Red seemed angry, not panicked, though maybe flight had simply morphed into fight somewhere along the way.

“Where are we?” Sláine asked, looking around for a door or some other kind of exit. The corridor from where they’d just come had vanished, and Sláine rapped her knuckles against the nearby wall to see if it was an illusion.

Nope, it felt solid. Huh.

“A place from my memories. We must be deep enough into her territory for her to make changes to the environment. Damn, it happened so quickly, too…!”

“Do you think she’s planning to ambush us here?”

Sláine summoned her halberd and did a full-turn around the room, gauging the girly bedroom’s feasibility as an ambush location. It seemed like the kind of place she ought to find a painting of a unicorn or a book of children’s stories featuring princesses, not fend off a horde of monsters, and the close quarters wouldn’t do her any favors given Sláine worked better with some maneuverability. She could use some of the assorted objects on the nearby desk — the decorative statues, a round amethyst paperweight — as impromptu projectiles, and the bed could be used as makeshift cover, but…

“…I doubt it. This is probably mostly to fuck with me.”

Sláine squinted. “Ah, yes. Doilies. How intimidating.”

“It’s just a distraction while she reforms,” Red snapped, and Sláine felt a bit bad for being snarky when there was a body on the floor and all. For all she knew, it could even be someone that Red had known or some personality-defining traumatic event she was being reminded of.

“Hm. Well. Can we navigate to wherever she’s… reforming, or whatever?”

“…Maybe?” Red slid a hand over the wall, as if looking for something. “There has to be a way to open up the secret passage from inside here. I never found it when I was a kid, but…”

She notably did not even acknowledge the body lying face-first on the ground.

“…What kind of bedroom can you only leave via a secret passage?”

“One for prisoners,” Red huffed, before pausing in realization. “Wait, when did you get out of the web?”

“Earlier.”

“…Well, alright then.”

Yes, Sláine much preferred bemused puzzlement over panicked fear, especially considering the implications of everything she’d just said. Was this — her old bedroom? Had she been locked up in here? Kept a prisoner? The thought of Red inhabiting such a room was absolutely ludicrous, but that mental image took on a different, unpleasant nuance when Sláine thought that perhaps none of it was actually her choice.

…Or she’d been so young that she'd genuinely enjoyed ridiculous decor.

“How do you know there’s a way to open this room from the inside?” Sláine asked, poking around herself in search of any secret buttons or levers. She wasn’t terribly confident in her ability to find something, but she’d rather try to be useful than stand around like a manager at a construction site.

“Whenever someone came into the room, the door always automatically closed after a set period of time, and whenever I was taken out for meals or… other things, I’d always find the bed made and everything cleaned up. Also,” A pause, “If I’d managed to sneak something banned into my room, it’d always be gone when I left. So the maids must have been able to come and go as they pleased.”

“It could just be whoever came in here worked in pairs, and the other person would wait outside to open the door again when they were done.”

Now that Sláine took another look at the body, the outfit it wore did look a bit like a uniform, with a dour grey skirt and what seemed to be a crumpled apron poking out from where it lay. Hm.

“I suppose that’s technically possible, but not really how things worked in the palace. Besides. Including a hidden switch to escape and knowing I was desperately trying to find it every night was absolutely my mother’s idea of entertainment.”

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“…Wow. Sounds like someone needed better hobbies. Has she ever considered picking up watercolors?”

Despite herself, Red snorted. “Damn, I wish. That would have been a much better use of everyone’s time. Uh. Sorry… about all this, by the way.” Awkwardness entered Red’s voice, and if she hadn’t been keeping her hands busy feeling up every corner of the room, Sláine thought she’d probably be fidgeting with her clothes. “I had absolutely no idea she was still after me, much less ballsy enough to try invading a foreign country just for a crack at kidnapping me again. If I’d known, I — obviously wouldn’t have gotten you involved.”

Sláine shrugged. “I’m not that discriminating when it comes to beating things up, and I’m happy to help you kill your crappy mother. Er, we are doing that, right? You’re not going to pull some, ‘oh no, I’m having last-minute flashbacks to the scraps of parental love she gave me, maybe I can restore this relationship!’ bullshit, right?”

“Abso-fucking-lutely not. I’d gladly take the killing blow on that shriveled up old bitch. Any ‘love’ — hell, any gratitude I ever had towards her is well and truly gone.”

“Good.” A pause. There was nothing behind the dresser, underneath the dresser, or on top of the dresser that made any cool new passageways appear. Perhaps inside the dresser? “Red. I completely understand if you don’t want to answer this, but… what is she, exactly? Aria mentioned something called a Boss. Is that what she is?”

“…Yeah,” Red said, hesitating. “I guess she’d be considered one. Um. A ‘Boss’ is a term that really only means something here. It’s a way to describe a creature or being that has control over a dungeon. It can shape them, remake them, add monsters to them… you’d probably think of it like a General in your homeland. A Boss can be a lot of different things, but as a general rule, they tend to derive a great deal of power from whatever Fear they serve and, to a large extent, embody it.”

“How do you… become one? Aria also mentioned something about… cutting people up to create them?”

The silence got decidedly more uncomfortable before Red finally broke it. “Um, yeah. So. The process can sort of be, um, forced, by replacing a person’s innards with, er, other… material. It, uh, can change the way you think a bit — saying that someone ‘has a good heart’ isn’t… entirely metaphorical. If you rip all that out and put other stuff in…”

“You create a monster?”

“Yeah,” Red replied, strained. “Of course, there’s still some of — of you there, which makes it even worse when it, like, happens to one of your friends or whatever. And if you have a particularly strong will, or if you just really, really reject the ideology of the Fear in question, then it’s not like you’re mind-controlled into serving it. In that case, it’s more like your body gets taken for a joy-ride, and it doesn’t really create a Boss.”

“So… basically, it’s only if you’re a power hungry dumb-ass, that you can get body-napped by these things and turned into a monster?”

“It’s — more complicated than that! It, it can sound really tempting, especially if you’re in a bad place. Every single Fear… it’s got something a bit comforting about it, doesn’t it? If you aren’t the one being victimized by it. Contagion, for example, it lets you be surrounded by things exactly like you, things that love you and accept you into the Swarm, and if you just want to surrender yourself to the void, Fathomless can be quite tempting. Propriety gives you the structure of orders, and a place in society to belong as long as you never, ever toe the line of what is appropriate behavior. Do you… understand?”

Sláine thought for a moment, but it made her nauseous to even contemplate, and she wanted to believe it was because she rejected the Fears so much that the thought of ever sympathizing with them was entirely abhorrent — not that it was in any way a temptation.

“…Maybe. But it’s not really important. Is there any way your mother could have known that you were here? Or is this just… a really awful coincidence?”

“Ugh,” Red shuddered. “Just call her ‘Amoena’. Hearing you say ‘your mother’ feels really gross. But…”

She stopped to mull this over. “The Dark doesn’t do coincidences. It always has some kind of fucked up plan, even if you can’t see it. But I don’t know what it could be. I hadn’t… heard anything about any plots to invade Arpege, not while I still lived in the Underdark.” A pause. “And no, I am not answering questions about that, thanks.”

“Wasn’t planning on asking,” Sláine said, idly picking through one of the drawers. Clothes, unsurprisingly, fancy looking dresses that, size wise, seemed suitable for a still-growing child. She abandoned her search upon opening the next one and finding it was (probably) Red’s childhood underwear. She had certain lines she was not intending to cross. “But anything you can tell me about Amoena would help, given that she’s trying to kill us and all. If she can reform herself, how is it that she can be defeated? What sorts of things can she do? That kind of thing.”

“Well, she’s a priestess,” Red explained, moving along her careful search of the wall. “Which means she’s blessed with the power of resurrection. She’s not… the body you see, that’s not really her. Her essence is actually all of the spiders stuffed into the person-suit. Unfortunately, that makes her a royal pain in the ass to kill.”

“Sounds like a job for fire. Lots and lots of fire.”

“…Yeah. Ideally.”

In the silence, Sláine received another notification.

[ Detection has reached level 3! Still trying to save you! Please hold!!! ]

Okay, there has to be some kind of secret then, based on what Aria had told her about the [ Skill ] before…

Sláine reached into the desk drawer, tugging it open. Stone furniture was a bit inconveniently heavy, and she wondered for a moment how a child had dealt with it all before being distracted by something inside. It was a book bound with cloth the same horrible bright color of Red’s hair. Sláine knew it was wrong, but she couldn’t help herself. “You kept a diary?”

“Oh hell, that thing?” To Sláine’s surprise, Red actually sounded delighted, pulling her hands back from the wall and coming to peer over her shoulder. “Damn, if anything in here was actually real, I’d take that with me in a heartbeat. Not to, like, dilly-dally, but give it a look.”

Sláine gave her a baffled stare, though honestly, she was willing to waste a few minutes if it meant cheering Red up a bit. The more fearful and upset she was, the worse things would be…

Also, she had to admit that she was curious — what did little bitty Red have to write about? Sláine opened to a random page, and…

“…Is that a drawing of a raised middle finger?” Sláine asked, somehow equal parts aghast and amused.

“Yeah, I actually kinda liked to draw before, and since the servants would always look through my things — wait, what, seriously? It’s underneath the bed?”

Sláine turned, blinking as Red dropped to her knees and reached underneath the bed, fumbling for… something. Then, with a click, she heard the grating sound of stone scraping against itself, and she turned around to see a passageway open before them.

“Okay, that took a lot longer than I’d hoped for, but… let’s see what else is in store for us, I guess?”

Sláine dropped her gaze down to the body lying right in front of the door. Whoever it was, they’d probably been entering the room when they’d been stabbed in the back by someone from behind. While she didn’t intend to put more thought into it than necessary, it definitely didn’t bode well for the pleasantness of anything else that was going to be in this place.

But all there was to do was stride forward, and like Red had done when she was a child, try to keep their spirits up even when confronted with the impossibly horrible.

>> Avoid stepping on the corpse