Chapter Two Hundred and Eleven - The Prisoner's Dilemma

Squeezing into the first floor was surprisingly hard. The passage was just wide enough at the start to walk through, but quickly became so narrow that I had to move in sideways. It was much harder for Emmanuel and Bastion. The cervid because he was just plain wider than us, and because of his body shape, couldn’t go in sideways, and Bastion because despite his size, his armour still clanged on the walls.

Still, with a bit of sweating and grumbling, all six of us made it through.

“Always tricky that part,” Howard said as he brushed off his trousers. “Had to guide this young lad once. Well-fed fellow. He stayed stuck halfway through and for a moment I feared we would be done for.”

“That sounds awful,” I said. I couldn’t imagine being stuck in a cave like that.

There was a fair bit of light in the cavern we were now in. The ceiling above was quite a ways up, and while the cave was somewhat narrow and had some plateaus and rocky walls, there was a clear space to walk along down the centre.

A small rivulet ran across the floor, with faintly glowing moss on its edges. No stalagmites or stalactites though.

I worked my shoulders and eyed the room, then turned to Howard. “So, what can we expect here?” I asked.

“The first floor’s an easy one,” he said. "The worst monster here are the shrug-goths. Normally they wouldn’t disturb you at all, not if you know what you’re doing. Now... well, they’ve been a little more aggressive, but we’ve noticed that if you give them room they’ll go about doing their own things still.”

“How very interesting,” Emmanuel said. He tore his sword out of its scabbard. “I shall, of course, eliminate these monsters before they truly pose a threat to anyone.”

I placed a hand on his wrist and lowered the sword. “How about we don’t hurt anyone we don’t have to?” I asked.

My ears twitched. I heard something, and it wasn’t Amaryllis’ whining about getting her feathers wet. A strange croak-y noise from deeper in the cave.

“What was that?”

“That’s the frogs,” Howard said. “Dungeon toad. Nothing to worry about.”

Bastion, who had a hand on the pommel of his sword from the moment Emmanuel reached for his, looked towards Howard. “What’s the test here?”

“It’s a trust test,” Howard said. “One of the reasons we’d rather send in only one or two folk down here. Makes it easier to trust each other. But as long as we all cooperate, there won’t be any harm. It’ll be easier to explain once we’re there.”

We took a moment to make sure all our gear was ready–we'd had to take off our backpacks to fit through the crevice–then followed after Howard once more.

The cave twisted around and opened up into a large room. It was maybe the size of a hockey rink, but misshapen, with darkened corners and piles of rock here and there. At the far end was a huge door, all old wood with metal bands across it, and a hefty chain above it. At a glance, I guessed that the door was meant to slide up into the wall.

To the side was a large pond. In the near-darkness of the room, I could dimly make out some shapes moving within the clear water. A faint fog hovered just over the still waters, obscuring part of the room, especially as it spilled past the banks.

“What is that?” Amaryllis asked as she snapped her talons to create a ball of light. She raised it, bathing the room in a whitish-blue glow.

There was a monster sitting atop a stack of rocks. Big, about the size of a car, with dozens of tentacles and droopy eyes, as if someone had found a couple of squids, stuck them together, then rolled them through a pile of googly eyes.

“That’s a shrug-goth,” Howard said, voice low and calm.

The monster was some ways away in the cavern, tentacles trailing into the pond behind it. It noticed us, but its placid eyes soon shifted away and stared at other things, as if we weren’t really interesting enough for it.

A Shrug-Goth of Insmouth, apathetic, level 9.

“It doesn’t look too mean,” I said.

“It shouldn’t bother us,” Howard replied. He pointed a webbed hand past the monster and towards that end of the room, drawing our attention to a little bridge crossing over the pond to a sort of pier on the far end. It was all wooden and looked a bit rickety, even from here.

“Iä! Iä!”

I glanced around, ears twisting to spot the source of the sound, and I found it in the form of a fat toad slumped next to the pond.

“Iä!” the toad repeated.

“The test here’s pretty simple,” Howard said. “Back over there, on the other side of the bridge are a few rooms. Usually there’s just three of them. Each one has a lever that you need to pull to open the floor’s door.” He pointed to the big wooden door at the far end.

“And then we can go?” I asked.

“That’s the most of it,” he replied.

“That sounds a little easy,” Amaryllis said.

“That’s because there’s a mite more to it. When you pull the lever in one room, the door to that room locks up until enough levers are pulled. You only need to pull as many levers as there are folk with you, so even if there are only two of you, and three rooms, you only need to pull levers in two of the rooms, letting you advance with only two folk.”

“Um, I don’t see a trap,” Awen said.

Howard rubbed at the back of his neck. "Well, see, when you pull the lever, it doesn't just work toward unlocking the floor's door, it also closes and seals the door to your own room. There’s a second lever that’ll unlock your door at the back, but pulling it before the floor’s main door is open isn’t a great idea."

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"So, to open the floor door, you have to deliberately trap yourself?" Amaryllis asked.

“Uh,” I said. “So we go into those rooms, and pull two levers?”

“That’s the whole of it,” Howard said.

The little bridge was a bit closer to the shrug-goth than I’d have liked, but even as we came closer the dungeon monster didn’t do much more than eye us suspiciously for a bit.

“What happens if someone pulls the second lever right after the first? I don’t enjoy being trapped.” Amaryllis asked.

Howard was quiet for a little bit. “Depends. Usually, someone dies. I think you’re all good folk, so I don’t expect that sort of thing to happen. Just sit back and wait for the mist to clear. I can hollar when it’s safe to leave.”

I was a little concerned about the bridge, but it didn’t hide any traps, not unless being very poorly made and rather rickety was a trap. We avoided the more rotten planks and made it across the pond to the pier with no trouble.

As Howard had said, there were three rooms here, each one dug into the side of the cavern wall. There were some torches within, lit already and casting an orange glow within. There were two levers in each room, one near the door, one at the far end.

“You’ll want to pull at the nearest one,” Howard said.

“Three rooms,” I said. “And a lot more than three of us. I guess three of us go in and pull the levers while the rest of us wait out here?”

“Do we need to pull them at the same time?” Amaryllis asked.

Howard shook his head. “Nah, just got to pull them all. We should all split up into the rooms.”

“Don’t we just need one of us to pull the levers?” I asked.

The fishman rubbed at the side of his nose. “Not quite. Once all three levers are pulled, the main door opens, and a fog rolls in. If the door of your room isn't closed when the fog arrives, you die.” Howard paused for us to protest, but we just stared. “We just need to wait the fog out.”

“You die of what, exactly?” Amaryllis asked.

The fishman shrugged. “Don’t rightly know.”

“You never tried to learn?” Bastion asked.

“Not worth the risk,” Howard said.

I rubbed at the back of my neck, then shrugged. “Alright. Do we want to draw straws?”

“That sounds troublesome,” Amaryllis said.

“Fine then. Bastion, you’re with Emmanuel in the first room. Amaryllis, you’re with Awen in the third. Howard and I will go to the middle room. That works for everyone?”

“I suppose so,” Emmanuel said. “Though I’m worried that two ladies are without anyone to protect them.”

Amaryllis pointedly walked off.

I skipped over to the middlemost room, Howard following after me a moment later. The room wasn’t very big, but it wasn’t too cozy even with two of us squished in. I turned towards the lever nearest the door, and noticed a little symbol scratched into the wall next to it. A sort of line with five branching bits. It was too careful to be an accident.

“That’s the Elder Sign,” Howard said before I could ask. “It’s good luck.”

“Huh, alright,” I said. Clearing my throat, I called out to the others. “Are you all ready?”

“We are,” Amaryllis said.

“As are we,” Bastion replied.

I reached up and wrapped a hand around the lever nearest the door. This was us trusting Howard to do the right thing, or at least to guide us in the right direction. “On the count of three,” I said. “One.”

“Two,” said Amaryllis.

“Three,” Bastion said next.

I grit my teeth and pulled the lever down as hard as I could. It was a bit rusty, and I had to put all my weight on it to force it down. I even heard Amaryllis and Awen grunting as they no doubt worked together to lower theirs.

Three dull clunks sounded out as we finished, then the doors over our rooms came slamming down from above and closed us off from the main room. Metal doors, with bars spread wide enough that I might have been able to squeeze my head past them in a pinch.

A boom came from the door at the far end of the room, and I saw the shrug-goth raise its head a moment before it slumped into the water, its many-tentacled form wriggling into the pond and disappearing with barely a splash.

The floor door shuddered, then started to rise. It was slow, only moving up a centimetre or so a second. I soon lost sight of the edge as a rolling fog started to eek into the room. It carpeted the stony ground near the entrance, then coiled its way closer even as the tendrils of mist broke apart and filled with air with hazy white.

“Just a few minutes, now,” Howard said.

I nodded, eyes searching for something in the fog. There was... definitely something moving in it. Or maybe it was just the strange glow from the mossy walls playing tricks in the haze.

Fog washed over my feet, and I felt a chill race up my legs and through my spine before I poured some mana into my Cleaning aura. The fog almost hissed as it drew back.

“Creepy,” I said. It was almost a whisper. It felt wrong to speak too loud now that there was some very suspicious fog around.

“We just need to wait a few minutes,” Howard whispered back. “Once the gate’s all the way up, the fog will start to clear.”

“Alright,” I said. “I can be patient.”

“I’m no coward that will hide from some measly fog! Come! Let’s scour this place for any worthy foes!”

I closed my eyes and tried to pretend that I didn’t see Emmanuel trot out of his room just after the gate over that room’s door clattered up and out of the way.

“Maybe Amaryllis was right,” I admitted.