“Ohhh yeah, I’m sure it’s just a quest! Way to go, jackass!” Ascilla said, sitting with her back leaning against the stone wall of a cramped jail cell.

I hung my head. Not much to say to that…

After being ambushed by the knights in that clearing we were led back towards the town of Oaktree. The whole while we’d tried to explain to the NPCs that it wasn’t us who killed the deer, or whatever that thing was… but they were having none of it.

Apparently getting captured like that was either part of the quest, or by killing the deer, someone or something had broken the quest chain and immediately caused a bad end. Hopefully it wasn’t that second one.

About forty minutes after we’d been walking back in the direction of the city, the priest turned around and cast a spell on both of us that completely took away our ability to see. It was an immensely uncomfortable feeling. It wasn’t like having my eyes closed, it was like my eyes had never existed in the first place.

It was only thanks to the knights keeping a firm grip on us as they led us through they woods that we didn’t constantly stumble and fall to the forest floor.

Eventually the sound of a squeaking gate let me know that we’d probably arrived at our destination. Shortly after, the soft feeling of dirt and grass faded away and was replaced by a hard and flat surface. Brick maybe? It was hard to tell.

The echo of our footsteps made me think we’d been led into some sort of large and open room, but the fifteen minutes of walking that it took to get to wherever it was we were going led me to think it was some sort of underground tunnel.

Adding evidence to my tunnel theory, almost immediately upon switching to the more firm ground the familiar heat of the sun vanished from my shoulders and head. Wherever we were it seemed like we’d moved inside.

Eventually, we heard another sound of a door opening, and then we were led down a flight of stairs, followed by another, and another.

After the third set of stairs we moved just a few feet forwards before our vision was returned.

Even though the area that we’d been led to was dark, going from pitch black to a room filled with dim lantern light temporarily blinded me and it took a minute for my eyes to adjust to the sensation.

Once they did I looked around and realized that we’d found ourselves in what could only be described as a dungeon. Six cells, each only about three meters in each direction, lined both sides of the hallway. Oil lanterns hung between them giving the whole space an eerie vibe.

From what I could see, no other people were unfortunate enough to be locked up. We were alone in wherever this place was.

Behind us, the staircase we had just been led down went up to another floor, and at the end of the rows of cells in front of us, an open door led further into wherever this place was.

The priest didn’t have any words for us, and neither did the knights, as they forced us both into the middle cell on the right hand side of the room and slammed the door, locking it with a key that, of course, they took with them.

Along with locking us into the cells, they were also kind enough to take away our weapons. I later checked my inventory and realized that when they said “Took our weapons” it really did mean that all of our weapons were gone… great.

Fortunately for me, they left us with our armor still on. Had they taken that, I think before the quest had a chance to kill me, Ascilla would have attempted the first known player vs player kill in the game with her bare hands.

And so that was what led us to now. Sitting in a cell and waiting for something to happen for the last hour. Of course, I’d take all the blame for this one. There was no way I could have known that this quest would lead to an event like this… but I still felt bad for Ascilla who had been roped in and was now sitting on the floor leaning back against the wall with a less than amused expression on her face.

I’d have to make it up to her later.

The first thing that we’d tried to do when the guards finally left and we were alone was contact someone who was decidedly not stuck in a dungeon somewhere outside of town. Though he wasn’t slated to get back until later, Ascilla decided to send Rain a message. Or at least, she would have, but of course…

Our messages weren’t sending.

It seemed that whatever this place was, it wasn’t treated like just being out and about in a regular zone. A part of me was terrified that we’d started some sort of level twenty dungeon by accident and would have to fight our way out in order to escape. But a bigger part of me had a different train of thought.

We did have one saving grace… A silver lining that was only there because, after all, this was still a video game above all else.

“We do have one chance.” I said. Ascilla looked at me like I was something that she had scraped off her shoe.

“Oh? What brilliant plan have you come up with this time?” She said, not trying to hide her annoyance.

“Well, you said it earlier, right? Even if this went sideways, it’s still part of a quest. If this is a scripted event, then there’s something that we can do in this room to progress.” I said, putting my hand on my chin to think.

“Knock yourself out, man.” She said, leaning her head back and closing her eyes.

I shrugged. In dungeons like this, there could be quite a few different “answers” to the puzzle. Even finding one of them would be a start, but my goal was to give us as many options as possible.

Of course, there was still a chance that this dungeon was part of a predetermined event, and that after a set period time we’d be put on trial and have an opportunity to clear our names and start the real quest… but if that wasn’t the case and instead after a certain amount of time we were taken out of our cell and executed…

Well, that would be the worst case scenario. And the fact that it had already been an hour with no sign of progress leaned me to believe that the answer wasn’t something as simple as just sit around… So I at least wanted to try finding another way out of here before continuing to employ the sit and wait strategy.

The first thing we had to figure out was when we could mess with stuff. In games like these, the guards occasionally walking past would bust you if they thought you were up to anything suspicious, and so figuring out the pattern of the guards was the first step in a successful escape.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

I put my hands on the bar of the cell and looked out into the room, impatiently waiting for someone to come through the door at the end of the hallway like they had before.

“What’re you doing?” Ascilla asked.

“Checking to see when the guards come.” I replied.

“Ten minutes.” Ascilla replied, still resting with her eyes closed.

“Hm?”

“The guard walks by once every three minutes on the dot.” She said.

Huh... well that was certainly good information to have. “Thanks.” I said, she shrugged and went back to resting against the wall.

Ok, so ten minutes for a guard to come around, that was plenty of time to mess with stuff. Time to start experimenting!

The first thing I checked was magic. Even if Spark didn’t do a ton of damage, there was a chance that I could blow the lock off… though that would probably cause enough of a commotion to have those guards in here immediately.

I held my finger out in front of me and started to trace the rune in the air in front of me. As soon as I felt power building in my arm I closed my fist and cancelled the spell. That was good to know, that would be our last resort.

Still… didn’t that make it feel like this scenario was totally favoring magic casters?! Didn’t they think it was a little unfair that we got our weapons taken but mages got to fire off spells all willy nilly in here? Where was the justice… though I was sure that doing something like casting a fireball on the door to blow it open would only alert the guards.

And since there was no telling who would wind up in a situation, usually games avoided creating scenarios where only one class or role was able to solve a puzzle… here was hoping that Eld was at least somewhat well designed…

Oh well. With magic out of the picture, and brute force sure to cause too much noise to make a clean getaway, I turned my attention to the room itself. There had to be something in here that we were meant to use.

Sometimes there were items hidden inside of the bed or on the ground somewhere that would help you escape. I worked for about twenty minutes checking every nook and cranny before eventually leaning back against the cold rock wall and letting out a groan.

“This sucks.” I said. Ascilla leveled an icy glare at me.

“Yup.” She said. Couldn’t argue with that.

There had to be something in the room… but whatever it was wasn’t coming to me…

In desperation I went to the front right corner of the room and methodically started tapping on the stones that made up the wall, looking for some sort of secret button or passageway.

Ascilla watched me out of the corner of her eye for the next ten minutes as I meticulously poked and prodded no fewer than three hundred stones built into the walls and floors. I’d even pulled the bed away from the wall and checked behind that… nothing.

After thoroughly casing the whole room, I sighed and walked back over to the gate. If that wasn’t it then what were we going to do? Was the answer really just to wait for something to happen?

I looked down at Ascilla. Wait…

“Hey. Stand up a sec.” I said.

“Why?” She asked.

“Just do it.” I said, an odd feeling of dread building in the back of my mind.

She eventually relented and with a sigh she pulled herself to her feet and took a step away from the wall where she’d been sitting. Right behind where she’d been leaning for the better part of 90 minutes was a single stone that was clearly a different color than the rest, it also looked like most of the grout holding it into the walls had also been removed…

“Seriously..?” I asked, leaning down and easily freeing the rock from its home, revealing a small cubby carved into the wall.

“Pfffft.” Ascilla couldn’t hold back her laughter as I reached into the cubby and retrieved a single item. A small steel lockpick.

I hung my head and let out a long sigh.

“Pffahaha! That’s amazing.” She said, shaking her head.

I really didn’t know what to say at this point…

With our escape tool found I turned back to my partner in wrongfully accused crime. Fortunately, it seemed that my misfortune had improved her mood, if only slightly.

I thumbed over to the door and then pointed to either side.

“Which way do you think we should go?” I asked Ascilla. She thought for a moment before giving her answer.

“The priest was the one who took our weapons and he went back up the stairs to the left.” She said.

I thought for a second then nodded. Getting our weapons back was probably the first big task in the “escape the prison” objective. Without them, even lower level monsters that may be around were dangerous, and something about the game making us lose our weapons and craft or farm for new ones rubbed me the wrong way.

Now all that was standing between us and freedom was how hard it’d be to get the cell door open…

Normally games had a thieving, or sometimes even a lockpicking skill. Since I hadn’t tried to break the law, criminal skills like that hadn’t yet appeared when I’d gone to level up. Though I did guess that some other more exploration-based playstyles probably would pick up a proficiency in picking locks and disarming traps as well. Maybe it would be worth the investment…

Of course, I didn’t have any skills like that yet, and neither did Ascilla. That just left the old fashioned “try and hope it works.” And so I stepped over to the iron barred door that was trapping us in our cell and waited.

A few minutes later, the guard marched down the hall. Robotically turned on his heels, and retreated out of sight back the way he came. Right. Now it was time to get to work!

The problem with picking the lock was that the keyway was out in the hallway, and not in the room, so you’d essentially have to stick your hands out of the bars and pick it backwards…

I also wasn’t sure if picking a lock was possible without it’s requisite skill, but not trying was not an option so I gingerly slid my hands through the bar and inserted the end of the pick into the open keyway.

I hung my head. If there was some sort of lock picking mini game or system then it didn’t have an obvious menu or user interface to help with the process… I’d have to do it manually.

Fortunately, trying to become a master locksmith was the greatest shame of nearly every middle school boy, and so this wasn’t my first time trying to force open something I probably shouldn’t… though the lock on my school locker that I messed up with a bobby pin like a decade ago was probably not the greatest parallel for experience…

Sticking the pick into the keyway I started to gently rake along the pins at the top of the lock. Normally you’d have to also twist the lock to get it to open, but since the game had only provided a pick in the cubby I’d imagined that this was all that we’d need to get it open.

Sure enough, after about a minute of shuffling the thin piece of metal around, a popping sound followed by the slightest creek of hinges broke the silence of the dungeon.

I quickly grabbed onto the door and held it closed, but a little bit of pressure showed that it was no longer being held into place. The lock had been undone.

“Got it!” I whispered.

Ascilla let out a long sigh. After a minute she shrugged. “You’re lucky there’s probably only one way out of here.” She said, walking over to the door. “If we make it out of this I’m going to give you a swirly.”

The look in her eyes made it painfully obvious that she wasn’t joking.

I briefly thanked Dr. Larson for not putting toilets in the game...

About seven minutes later, the guard, one of the knights in the antler armor, walked past our cage, turned on his heels and mechanically marched back to the right and passed back through the door at the end of the hallway.

Ascilla gingerly laid her hands on the bars to the gate and began to push it open.

“Oh!” I said, putting my right fist into my left palm and turning back towards the room. The sudden noise made Ascilla jump so bad I thought she was going to hit the ceiling… oops.

I dashed over to the bed against the back wall and ripped off the sheets. I took the ratty pillow and laid it to the side and with some creative folding put the whole mess back on the cot in a way that it looked like there was a person sleeping. If I was being honest, it looked better than I expected it to!

“The fuck are you doing?” Ascilla hissed at me under her breath. She had already started opening the door when I’d turned around, but when she realized I went back into the room she’d pulled it most of the way back closed.

“I dunno… maybe they’ll think we’re just taking a nap?” I said with a shrug which caused Ascilla to pinch her nose and sigh.

“…Whatever. Hurry up.” She said, pushing the cell door open just enough to poke her head out and look down the hallway.

She tucked her head back in a second later and looked back towards me.

“I can’t see him. Let’s go.” She said. She pushed the gate open slowly, trying her best to be gentle enough to prevent it from making any noise, and stepped through, pressing herself against the left hand wall leading towards the staircase.

It wasn’t perfect, if someone were really looking for her they’d easily see her standing there, but at least at a glance some cover was better than none. Then again, NPCs were run by the computer, and the computer knew the second we’d picked the lock that we were escaping.

If they wanted to, the knights could all show up right now and we’d be toast. Here’s hoping that the game itself at least decided to play fair…

I followed Ascilla’s lead and pushed myself into the hall before closing the door to the cell behind me. As soon as it was pressed all the way shut, it locked itself again with a click. With a silent nod, we both dashed off towards the staircase, leaving our now empty cell and the dungeon behind us.