Nathan stared at where a five-foot pentagonal pillar had stood a moment before, blinking as he took in the eight-foot-tall, three-foot-wide door that had taken its place.
“What just happened?”
“You solved the puzzle,” Tanya told him blandly. “While… providing an educational segue about whatever volcanoes are.”
“Huh. Oh, I guess it was just… create the mural based on the clue phrase? That’s all there was to it? No need to index into the name of the central element of each tile by the offset from center and then form a clue-phrase that then got turned back into a single word? We don’t have to take the scenes the faces represent, find an encoding of that into characters, and—”
“Opening puzzles are simple,” Honey said gently. “And this is early-shard. If we were ten more segments in, looking at a rest chamber puzzle-hold hybrid challenge? Then you’d get something like that.”
“The dungeon really likes ‘run the encode or decode again on what you got’ in puzzles,” Tanya agreed. “That’s a fun one.”
“How did you figure this one out, by the way? I couldn’t decide what to do with the fish.”
“Oh, that?” Nathan blinked a few times, casting his mind back into the ancient eras of dozens of seconds back. “I just figured it was a red herring and ignored it.”
There was a moment of contemplative silence in which Tanya decided, quite deliberately, not to partake in violence and Honeydew decided, equally deliberately, that it was completely appropriate to burst into a series of giggles. Since she had already done so and was having some minor trouble controlling them, it would have been extremely inconvenient to her to conclude otherwise; this, she knew, and her decisions were not changed by the knowing. Or so she was confident in thinking, but humans—and she was a human despite all of the divinity and magic coursing through her veins—are perennially driven to self-justification, and Honeydew was no stranger to doing the same.
All the same, her definitions of when it was appropriate to burst into giggles were highly tailored around never having to confront such hypocrisies or concerns. So it was, and so it would remain, and so did the narrative of her life and of Nathan’s intersection with it continue.
“So do we just…”
“What do the runes say?”
“Tanya!” Honeydew sounded shocked, but even Nathan could tell that it was performative, something made easier by the fact that her giggling intensified as she did her best to scold her partner through them. “You can’t just ask someone what the ancient, possibly primordial magical runic script on the door says!”
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The partner in question nodded, patting the cloud-brained sorceress on the head fondly. “I absolutely can’t just ask him, it’s true. I did it without a just, which is the key, you know.”
“Mostly just ‘congratulations on the solve’, whatever that means,” Nathan said over the sputtering giggles, or possibly giggly sputtering. “Something about how the COIN—it’s, uh, in emphatic script—is in a different Layer, please solve the metapuzzle to continue, but that’s marked as humor rather than seriousness. Remember to sleep and hydrate?”
“Oh, Slut, that’s great.”
“It says the next room is, and I want to emphasize that I’m quoting here, ‘Just some straight-up murdering, except with some twists, good luck’.”
“Ah, dicks. I hate twists,” muttered Tanya. “They tend to hit me in the ankles. I like my ankles untwisted.”
“It’ll be fiiiiine,” crooned Honeydew. “I’ll carry you home if you get them broken.”
Nathan blinked at that mental image, and both of them snickered at his poleaxed expression. “Please tell me that you would do it in a princess carry,” he said neutrally. “It would be very funny, and not just because that’s how Tanya was carrying you earlier.”
“God of steel and elemental pain, spare me this.” The towering woman in question glared down at both of the others, emphasizing the part where she was doing it down. Cracking her knuckles, then her neck, she reached up to the hilt of her sword. With a flex of her wrist, it spun out through the side of her scabbard, answering for Nathan’s unspoken benefit how she was expecting to carry and draw the unwieldy thing. “I’m just going to go through. You don’t have to come after me. If I die, I avoid the rest of your jokes.”
“No, no dying!” Honeydew dove for the door in Tanya’s wake, an exaggerated motion rendered comical by the way she pointlessly swam through the air. “No dying, you promised me triple-chocolate raspberry mousse cake!”
“All debts are discharged on death!” She spun the sword in her hands and then flourished it, seamlessly transitioning from the hilt rotating in her hands to the edge windmilling at first one side and then the other in a manner that could itself easily be described as spinning. “To the loser goes the spoils!”
“You absolute jerk, wait for me!”
Nathan looked steadily at the door which the two women had fled through, scratching his chin performatively. “I guess,” he said to himself and nobody else, “I might as well follow them? They’re… really not the planning type, are they.”
Saucer shifted into a shield form in his hand, and he idly twirled the short spear he’d been handed by Honeydew—made of elemental stone, she’d said, mixed with elemental permanence in order to give it form—until he realized what he was doing. Chuckling, shrugging, he stepped through the door with his shield up and his spear at the ready.
Glancing around on the other side, he lowered his guard with a shake of his head.
“A twist, huh. I don’t know what I expected, but given how much of a shitpost this segment has been, I… feel like I should have seen this coming.”
“You and me both,” Honeydew agreed, Tanya being silent, or at least beyond words. “Grab a cinnamon twist. They’re pretty good!”
Sighing, helpless to argue the point, Nathan obeyed.