Ioren walked across the cool stone floor of a long abandoned Danetian structure in complete darkness. The buzz of his darks and the soft scrape of his cloth shoes were the only sound these walls had likely heard in hundreds of years. Each tip-toed step pierced the tense silence like glass shattering, as Ioren kept his ears on full alert at all times. It was slow going when he moved so cautiously, but it was necessary to keep a low profile when other Finders could be lurking behind any corner. Civility reigned in Havan and even Yasha's Step, but out here in Danet there were no laws or city guard to protect you -- only your own strength and cunning. The raw danger both scared him to death and dared him to feel truly alive.
The thrill was addicting. Each time he returned to Yasha's Step at the entrance to the Danet region it felt like putting on ear muffs at a symphony. The semblance of beauty and life was there, but the unadulterated experience was just out of reach. It was a thin tightrope the Finders walked, death waiting on each side, but each return trip made him feel just a little bit more invincible.
A drip of water echoed faintly through the empty hall and made Ioren pause. He had chosen this location because it was along the southern coast of Danet, one of the only known regions that received rain on the continent. Yasha’s Step and all of the explored villages to its west were within a rain shadow cast by the colossal mountains of the Continental Spine, so the area was extremely arid aside from the underground aquifers that sustained the Finders and the Vanguard at the Step. The rain helped a solo Finder like Ioren mask his movements and noises, and also would keep him alive in the unlikely event that his canteen was punctured, or he was unable to find a water source to replenish it. There was one other reason he loved to explore these decaying structures in the rain, too.
Ioren moved quietly through the black halls with a cat’s grace, weaving through the shadows, mentally tracking his turns, all the while keeping an ear out for the rhythmic dripping. Each drop allowed him to hone in on the location, until finally he stood above a small puddle fed by a slow drip from the ceiling. Dripping water meant the rain was seeping in through a crack. Now, the crack could be from the incredible age of the structure, but there was another possibility that Ioren hoped for. He dropped onto his hands and knees and felt around gingerly until he found what he was looking for. A raised brick, nearly imperceptible except to the most trained fingers, lay just beneath the surface of the cool pool of water. A pressure plate.
Just as Ioren quietly celebrated his find, he heard a hushed whisper travel down the hall behind him. A jolt surged through his veins like lightning, and every hair on his body stood on end. He quickly scanned the hall for a hiding place, and found a small alcove just ahead to his left. Taking care to leap over the puddle - and the concealed pressure plate - Ioren fluttered on light feet over to the dark corner. His heart pounded at his chest, threatening to escape, urging him to sprint away with all his might. Instead, he stayed hidden in the alcove, and peeked around the corner down the hall, toward the oncoming whispers.
After a few moments, a pair of men came around the corner at the end of the hall. One held a burning torch that illuminated the stone walls in flickering, uncertain orange light. The flame was too bright for Ioren’s darks, so he pulled them down around his neck for now. The second man held a longsword, nervously extending it in front of him with two hands. They were obviously inexperienced and under-equipped for a place like this; he wouldn’t even be able to swing the longsword without hitting the bricks to either side.
Ioren’s pulse began to slow as he assessed the situation. He could easily disarm the unsure man, but fire was always a wild card, especially in a confined space. His eyes drifted downward to the puddle and the pressure plate within. A smile formed on his face in the darkness as he watched the duo advance unknowingly.
“Watch the torch, you bumbling idiot; the ceiling is dripping. We’ll be lost forever in this place if that fire goes out.”
“Do you even know how a resin torch works? A few drops of water aren’t going to extinguish this thing. Hell, I could probably dunk it in a bucket and it’d still light!”
The two continued to argue the finer points of resin flammability when the torch bearer stepped hard into the puddle. A low hum emitted from the crack in the ceiling, and the second man’s longsword suddenly shot up into the air, sticking to the ceiling. It was shortly followed by both of their belts, the clasps on the torch bearer’s shoes, and a handful of crowns. As the shoe clasps shot upward, they knocked the torch out of the bearer’s hands into the puddle, immediately extinguishing it. An attractor trap, Ioren thought excitedly. Attractors were worth a fortune to Royal Emissaries. He made a mental note to seek one out upon his return to the Step.
“What did you step on, you buffoon?” the now-disarmed swordsman shouted. The shout traveled down the hall, and its echo returned a few seconds later as a ghostly moan.
“Must have been a pressure plate or something…” the torch bearer said sullenly. Ioren raised his darks again up to his eyes, washing his sight in green and allowing him to see perfectly in the blackness. The torch bearer was fumbling in the puddle for the resin torch as the other man tried to leap up to the ceiling and grab their metal objects. Ioren unwrapped his cloth shoes to reveal his boots underneath, and deliberately stepped loudly from the alcove.
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The two men froze in Ioren’s green sights ahead.
“Hello?” The torchbearer called out into the void.
Ioren unsheathed the two daggers at his side slowly enough to exaggerate the noise in the darkness.
“Have you gentlemen ever met an excisor?” He asked loudly. A dark stain began to form on the trousers of the former sword bearer.
The torch bearer turned to run, not bothering to give a second glance at his partner as he bounded down the hallway from which they came. A moment later the other man snapped out of his trance and followed him quickly, slamming into not just one but two walls as he rounded the corner at the end of the hall.
Ioren chuckled to himself, imagining the straight face he would have to hold as he heard these two telling their “excisor” story in Gen’s Pub back at the Step. He took a moment to breathe deeply and release the tension in his muscles. Acid burned at his throat as he shook out his arms and legs. He was glad it hadn’t come to violence this time. The life of a Finder - or “scav,” as the Vanguard loved to call them - was difficult and distrusting by its very nature. If one found a valuable artifact, it was no longer available to the others, and the limited supply of valuable artifacts in Danet made this a zero-sum game. However, after all these years Ioren couldn’t help but feel a sense of camaraderie with the others; every day hundreds of Finders poured into Danet with the goal of funding just a bit more time here.
After returning to his senses, Ioren unclasped his backpack and belt and gently placed them on the floor a few feet back from the attractor trap. Next, he removed his leather chest armor and opened the quick-release pouch sewn into the front to reveal a handful of sharpened nails. He unwrapped one from the fabric that encased it and tossed it into the pool of water.
Nothing happened.
Ioren sighed happily and returned to his backpack to remove two more tools wrapped in cloth: a chisel and a float. He placed one end of the float on the floor and extended the other end upward before twisting and locking it into place. A float was, at first glance, only two small metal disks around four inches across. However, the disks could be extended from one another up to three feet, and when locked in place, held their distance away from each other no matter what passed in between. You could wave your arm through the air between the two disks without interrupting them in the slightest. Also, they held an immense amount of weight. Ioren had once seen two men perform a street act in which they both stood on the same disk and counterbalanced one another’s weight without it collapsing, appearing to float over nothingness. He tipped them generously for the knowledge.
After putting the float in place below the attractor trap in the ceiling, Ioren stood on the disk - carefully using the walls and the ceiling to balance himself - and began chiseling away at the hidden trap. His arms quickly tired from reaching over his head, but after nearly an hour of work and over a dozen breaks the device broke free.
Ioren carefully carried the encased attractor over to his backpack and opened the device from the top. As he expected, within lay a thin, square silver rod, nearly two feet long and two inches thick on each side. When one twisted the black strip at the end of the rod, it attracted all metal in front of it toward the rod. It was a dangerous gambit in a fight, as you’d now have your opponent’s stabbing implements flying directly at you at high speed, but the Royal Guard prized them for their effectiveness at crowd control.
For Ioren, it was thirty more days worth of rations and equipment for exploring Danet.
After removing the attractor, Ioren was also able to extricate the captured longsword and coins from the device. The shoe clasps he left. Taking a folded cloth from his backpack, Ioren gently wrapped the rod, sword, and stack of crowns and tied each end with a length of rope. He repeated the ritual with his chisel and float and replaced them in his bag. After closing up the backpack, Ioren slipped the straps over his shoulders and tied the pack tight across his chest and waist. He gave the contents a shake, but the padded items were silent.
Satisfied, Ioren retrieved his cloth shoes and slipped them over his boots before beginning to retrace his steps through the structure.
A hot breeze blew in through the hallway after a time, letting Ioren know he was approaching the exit. It was a tropical evening breeze that carried the salty smell of the sea on its back.
Ioren checked his wind up wristwatch. It had been forty-seven hours since he left Yasha's Step, with only two fitful sleeps since. The fatigue was finally beginning to seep into his muscles.
As Ioren rounded the final corner he removed his darks to avoid being blinded by the afternoon light. It was in vain, though, as pain shot through his strained eyes as he saw daylight for the first time in nearly forty hours. Luckily, clouds still covered most of the sky above him which muted the brightness. A gentle rain fell softly and caressed his scrunched face. He had a long road back to the Step, but he still had over 20 hours of reliable daylight left today.
Ioren took the steps down the face of the massive Danetian structure two at a time as he descended the pyramid-shaped stone building. It was one of three that sat nestled along the Black Beach of Danet's southern coast, but the only one with a Yashan Gate in front of it, signifying a Vanguard team had cleared it of Greys.
The black beach and blue ocean ahead created a stunning scene as sun rays slipped through the breaking rain clouds above, as if dead Finders in Paradise were heralding his safe return. Ioren wondered if his mother was one of them. Unfortunately there was no time to dwell on the thought as he put his head down to march. It took eight hours of hard hiking to finally return home to Yasha's Step.