A massive pipe organ dominated one end of the room. In this gloom, I couldn’t see where its sides ended. Which made it all the bigger: its sides didn’t end. The top didn’t either, its pipes extending into the ceiling, for all I knew.
Bayce fired some fire left and right. Meters upon meters later, each one hit a wall and quenched itself. This organ took up a full wall. Then more flames were launched, hitting flat stone and slightly melting metal.
Directly in front, there was, indeed, a throne. Maybe all the gold finery that had once adorned it had been stolen over time, because all that remained were a thin metal frame and bits of cushions. Behind it was something like a grand piano.
As Bayce strode up to the keys, I felt mixed fear and hope. Either this was an awful decision or a great one. Still, if it was a trap, I felt convinced that I could fight through it. If it proved to be the gizmo that set off an amazing string of mechanisms in the castle to give us a miraculous way forward, all the better.
It was neither. No sound came out as she pressed a key. Several others, pressed with conviction, didn’t do much more.
“Broken,” she said, lifting a lid. She let it slam down, then tossed fireballs upward and gazed at the results. She bit her lip. “That or it isn’t even an instrument anymore.”
Things were crawling in those pipes. I came closer, hopped onto the closed lid, and fired an Amber Beam. 8 percent of my SP was a decent price to pay for a better look, and the light, though not too strong, lasted a bit longer than a Lightning Spell’s.
Gray, grainy stuff was shimmering down the pipes—a substance that struck me as too dark and too…normal to be glitch dust.
I had an immediate suspicion of what this dust could be, but doubted it could help us. Plus, as the laser finished burning away ceiling rock and began to blink out, I spotted something else inside that made my skin crawl.
“Aah!” Bayce cried out, seeing what I saw. “What was…”
I took this time to pull out my clumsy Spirit Board and tell her, “MORE RATS. OR MORE MICE?” There were creatures, crawling down from someplace beyond the ceiling, inside of the dust.
Bayce shook her head. “Yeah, this isn’t helping. I think we just need to uncover more rooms.”
And I had to agree. I put the small mystery behind me and turned away.
Using the Board, I gave Bayce a request. “HELP WITH WALLS IF U CAN. JUST SAVE A FEW SPELLS FOR BATTLE.” With no immediate sounds of rats, at least we’d probably be safe for a few minutes.
Bayce put a finger to her chin. “I think I can speed this up a bit,” she said. I practically wagged my tail.
***
Suggestion number one wasn’t so successful. A single Lightning Spell could travel quite a ways, but when I attempted to blaze through multiple walls at the same time, I found that while the first wall was obliterated, the second was merely charred.
But that was still progress. My new Map was definitely getting filled out:
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map110-1.png]
See, after discovering the shape and size of the throne room, Bayce and I had started busting into new rooms, but not just willy-nilly. I was on one side of that big pipe organ, Bayce was on the other. I’d broken down one wall. She had broken down…none. But cut her some slack, she was using nothing but her wand fireballs and those were really weak. Bayce could use her own Lightnings or whatever, but leaving her with no good combat Spells was not something we’d have been remotely comfortable with. For now, she was blasting stone that just didn’t want to burn.
Suggestion number two remained to be tried, and once we had Bayce’s wall torn down, we could do it.
Oh, and I’d slapped a tracker on one of the rats earlier, in the thick of the fight. Watching their icon bob around wasn’t useful, except to tell me that there were indeed many warpy rooms in this castle.
I cat-jogged into the pitch-black chamber with the partially Lightning’d wall, padding slowly across a floor that, mercifully, proved to be un-booby-trapped and free of pointy sticks. Pushing at the wall, I found that some of the bricks were loose. Perfect, perfect.
Um, perfect if not for my seriously cumbersome Inventory. I swear, every time I got a game-changing upgrade, I got slapped in the face with more responsibilities—in this case, lots of Swiss army Spells—that basically cancelled it out. At least I’d put the Spirit Board in my easy access and jammed the Queen’s diary in that less convenient burlap sack, where it belonged.
In nekomata form, I grabbed the brick and raced back to the throne-and-organ room. Bayce had just burned a hole right beside her doorway, and when she saw me, she beamed.
“We’re getting somewhere!” she said under her breath. “Okay, hold it up and hold still.”
I did. The old brick sat on my palms, all while Bayce simply…stared at it. She looked at it straight on, then turned and rotated it with her free hand. Studying it hard so she could keep the image of it fixed in her mind.
This was necessary in order to cast an Attract Spell on something far away that you couldn’t even see.
Then, when she was done, she closed her eyes and exhaled. “Okay,” she said. “On the count of…thirty.” And she felt her way into the next barren room while I charged back to the place I’d been.
I set the brick on a rotting stool, un-Morphed, and waited in darkness, almost afraid that it wouldn’t work at all. But then the Spell went off, and it worked just as Bayce had said it would.
In an impossible burst of speed, the stone flashed away. It really might have teleported, except for the FWISH! and the choking dust cloud. Straight ahead, meters and meters away, I saw the faint twinkle of Bayce’s wand.
Her free hand held the brick, then lofted it like a trophy.
This was absolutely not the end of our worries, but we took the wins we could get.
Several minutes later, I asked, “WHATS THIS PLACE?”
By then, we’d uncovered more rooms and encountered more rats—though they were avoiding us now.
“I’m not sure,” she said after taking a drink from a canteen. She leaned against a column, not far from a once-cozy hearth. “You mean you don’t know?”
In the light of her wand, I shook my head.
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“Darn. You leading us straight here got my hopes up.” She flashed a good-natured smile, but probably didn’t have it in her to laugh. “Water?”
I nodded. Our “waterfall” technique was better than it had been with Reed by the Kaugs—I was more experienced while she was more refined.
Bayce kept reflecting. “This has got to be a historical relic, and yet, whenever I bust a wall down…I just don’t feel guilty. ‘S that odd?”
Uh…I shook my head. “THIS IS LIKE OUR PRISON, SO NO”
“Good point.” She squinted into the distance—in this case, through a big gaping wall-hole. “This is gonna sound weird, but I’m almost having fun here. It’s like all it took was for me to get a game plan. Now I know how to explore…and how to keep hitting my head against a wall until it simply collapses. In this case, pretty literally.”
Finding Reed was foremost in my mind right now. The relative fun of breaking stuff and feeling the thrill of battle had faded again, and taking this break had brought me back to the original goal. So while I understood where Bayce was coming from, I couldn’t exactly enjoy this.
“BEING SCARED CAN BE FUN,” I said.
“And it really shouldn’t be!” She put the canteen away and stretched. “Welp, can’t stay forever. Which way next, you said?”
I pointed a paw, but then corrected myself and turned elsewhere—orienting myself vis-a-vis the Map was harder when there was no sun to show me east and west.
“This way again?” Bayce said. “Why, you think we’ll find a doorway?”
To be honest, I wasn’t even sure this place was aboveground. And not because we’d warped here after diving into a pond. A cold mugginess like this just didn’t seem possible in, y’know, a world with sunlight and weather.
“NO BUT I THINK THERES STAIRS”
image [https://jmassat.com/wp-content/Catgirl%20System/Map/Map110-2.png]
Using my last Earth Spells, a single Ice Spell, and almost all of Bayce’s Attractions, we’d cleared several rooms in this castle, without seeing even a hint of a window or a way outside. What we hadn’t yet found was a dungeon keep—like the room we’d started out in—or a bedroom—like the second room I’d been in. No hatches, either.
Alright, maybe we could’ve made our way up to the ceiling of the throne room. After all, we’d knocked a whole chandelier down and left a gap in the ceiling. But sending fire through that hole had revealed more hard stone to push through. Not a reliable path and no guarantee it’d lead to anything.
The castles in my data banks had towers, towers at the corners. I was now guiding us northwest, and that was why.
Bayce trusted me without asking further. On the way to that corner, I had the feeling something fateful might be waiting at the other end, so I secured a Level Up by picking off one of the rats—guiltily, now that I knew they were sick and they were deliberately avoiding us. I scampered up to a wall and hissed in their face. After a swat, they fled.
That wasn’t so bad. But the Experience wasn’t enough, so I scouted out another, and that did it. Bayce watched with interest, but was biting her tongue.
The Level Up filled me with a physical rush, but my heart wasn’t in it.
Stats
Taipha Calico Ranger Lv. 30 EXP: 2% (93/4500)
HP 100% (855/855) SP 100% (820/820)
ATK 159 (+1!)
INT 93 (+2!)
DEF 111
WIS 104
SPD 132
With six Minor Heals and several Spells still in my arsenal, I should have felt prepared. Instead, I felt almost as nervous as I had when we’d first arrived.
As it turned out, another Lightning through the wall was all it took to reveal those telltale stairs.
They spiraled upward into darkness. Whether they’d spit us out onto parapets or into merely a few bedchambers, we still weren’t sure. What we did know was that they were not getting us back to the outside world. The world outside those notch-windows was flat black.
We stood before the doorway, stymied.
Despite having pooled our collective brainpower, we…did not exactly know how to scale these stairs.
The tower, you see, was connected to the hall we stood in by an open doorway. And the doorways would warp us.
I had considered that earlier. Looking at an archway just before I found Bayce struggling against the rats, I’d asked myself, “Shouldn’t there be powder on these doors?” It had to be there, given the Queen’s powerset…and yet we couldn’t see it.
Then, all of a sudden, an idea hit Bayce, along with her palm. “Ah!” she cried. “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” Without a word of explanation, she lifted her wand and blasted the top of the arch.
Nothing happened, so she blasted the floor.
Silver shimmers that hadn’t been visible before exploded from the point of impact, scattering in the air, across the ground. I jumped back, and so did Bayce—even further, repulsed in a much more visceral way.
“Sorry,” she hissed out. “I really shouldn’t have.”
It’s totally okay, I wanted to tell her. I tried in a meow.
Bayce picked up a fragment of a twig on the floor and tossed it forward—instead of bouncing on the blasted threshold, it disappeared.
Then she leaned forward just a little. She was studying the ground or the air somehow, but I couldn’t guess why.
She ran and came back half a minute later, holding our trusty Attraction brick. With fury, she lobbed it straight at the far end of the tower.
It hit the wall.
“That is some bullcrap,” she said instantly. “We’re finding a way to jump over this thing.”
“Meow?”
“Better yet—”
She ran away again, and while she was away, the pieces came together in my head.
Bayce came back with a vaguely familiar metal table, or maybe bench. It was a long rectangle with short legs. Old, but not too flimsy, and it might just hold up for the few seconds we needed it to. With triumph, she dropped it so the doorway cut across its center. Then she walked across the squealy slab and got through.
In order to be warped, you had to touch the dust…or the ground that held it. Objects could warp, but not if they only touched the ground long before the dust even began.
Either that, or organic things warped and inorganic things like metal didn’t.
Or maybe both! But we weren’t about to test both.
This was the power of logical thinking. I meowed in a low tone as I crossed.
“Come on,” she said in a playful growl. “You’re not any worse than me at this kind of puzzle-solving. I train to do it, so strictly speaking, I suck more than you.”
“Mreaow!” I cried. Nobody sucks!
We began to mount the stairs, looking all around us, keeping our eyes and ears alert. Nothing prepared us for the interruption that changed Bayce’s banter into a scream.
I yelped too, and we both jumped back. A sapphire wraith was right in front of us—so close that Bayce’s nose was an inch away from the kidnapped woman in her clutches, the hand clamped around her mouth.