“So these are the twists that the door told us about.” Nathan’s voice was dust-dry, desiccated and emotionless, like someone enthusiastically imported the Atacama Desert into a tabletop roleplaying game setting that was nominally about the Nile delta but which had far too much in the way of deserts to properly suit the terrain. “And the three corpses here were the combat portion of the room? Where’s the… anything and everything, including the door moving onwards?”
“Eh, eat your twist,” Tanya said dismissively, gesturing to suit the mood. “I’ll explain.”
Nathan took a bite of the pastry, eyes widening at how good it was. It was warm—just cool enough to eat comfortably—and crunchy, holding up exactly the right amount to the bite of his teeth without falling apart in his hands. It was flaky at the same time, and covered in something that was halfway between a cream sauce and large crunchy sugar crystals. Cinnamon spiraled along the ridges of the confection, and it tasted like there was butter and egg between every last flake of dough.
“Holy fucking Saint of Saints on a canopy, this is amazing.”
“It really is!” Honeydew beamed at him, practically radiant with happiness as she bit into another one of the delicacies on the platter, her fingers betraying that it was her second one. “Block in three seconds,” she mumbled around the mouthful. “B’hind ya.”
“Spoilsport,” Tanya muttered darkly.
“The fuck!” Nathan sprayed bits of pastry as he spun, shieldform Saucer forming around his hand and coming up to bat the sword aside that was aiming right for his neck. Reflexively, he stepped forward and thrust forwards and downwards with the spear in his other hand, punching through the chest of his assailant before he even realized the woman was there. “What the fuck,” he added pointlessly, having already made his position on the matter clear.
“It escalates with every one of them you eat,” Tanya told him with a completely serious voice and a smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. “I’ve had two, Honeydew’s about to—”
A person of ambiguous gender presentation and unambiguous wroth manifested between one heartbeat and the next, right behind the sorceress. Their daggers were already moving towards her, aiming towards her totally unarmored spine and neck, but Honeydew spoiled the strike by stepping backwards into it, taking the blades more safely in her kidney and shoulder.
She shuddered, eyes going wide as they penetrated her, and then she reached backwards and touched her assailant’s face with a single finger.
Both of them froze, and Nathan’s brain restarted as he raced to assess the scene and figure out if he should be helping in some—
“She’s got this,” Tanya said idly. “Funny shit is mostly over, get yourself situated while she drains him. And don’t think too hard about what we’re standing on, you don’t seem the reality bender type but no sense in risking it.”
“… dare I ask?”
“No.”
“Alright.” He rolled that around in his mind for a moment, then shrugged and started looking around as commanded.
It didn’t take very long. There really wasn’t much to see.
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They were standing on a vaguely defined something that was mostly nothing, like it was an instantiated mental trick of solid near-void given purely noetic form. It was as though someone had read about Platonic forms and decided to create a floor for the room out of pure essence of floor, and likewise the walls and ceiling—there was nothing there in any identifiable way, other than the simple fact of there being something there. A floor, four walls, and a ceiling, and the space defined therein; it was a room, a square room twenty feet on a side with a ten foot ceiling and a table in the center of it.
The table was completely mundane. Its surface was a three-by-three square, and it was slightly unsteady on four steel folding legs that had been extended and imperfectly locked in the deployed position. Mundane, too, was the platter on the table, and he had already tasted the surpassing transcendence of the likewise quite normal, if superlative, pastries on the platter.
Other than that, there was nothing around them but the four corpses, the still-living assailant frozen in a twisted parody of embracing the party’s sorceress, and the three delvers.
He skipped over himself—what more boring subject could there be, after all? He was entirely unremarkable, other than being somewhat more fit than anyone would expect a lazy middle-aged software developer to be—and attended only briefly to his two party members.
Honeydew was superficially the nuclear-powered cruise missile of the pair of them, granted peerless connections with sexuality, masochism, regeneration, and anything even remotely related to lightning, and she matched all of those with a broad magical power base that was not nearly as impressive to Nathan as it ought to have been, since he had no way to judge her against her peers or her opponents and challenges. That was changing, however, as a result of their two-on-one defeats against her partner, and also because she had responded to getting stabbed in the kidney by slowly disintegrating her opponent while the two of them remained time-locked; but he set that aside until it was time for him to review the opponent in question.
If Honeydew was the Orion Drive spaceship prepared with rods from God to drop from orbit, which remains a science fiction staple regardless of what anyone may think of its practicality, then Tanya was the essence of something departing the realm of architecture to enter the domain of physics: an orbiting laser cannon, or possibly one mounted on a ship, but either way one which was capable of nuking a city just as easily as drawing an extremely hazardous hopscotch court. She’d proven that by beating Nathan and Honeydew alike in their spars, a consistent result that hadn’t been particularly close; and she’d done that without using her strongest powers, the ability to tap into her emotions for powers beyond the already fantastical ones that were her baseline.
It was no surprise that they’d been able to kill their opponents. Nathan was rather more surprised that he’d managed to kill his own foe. That his spear, held in a fisted grip, had penetrated the man’s chainmail and killed him instantly could have been attributed to some manner of excellence in Honeydew’s creation of the spear if he hadn’t felt the impact and known the correctness of his strike—though of course the block he’d executed, spinning and almost flailing his arm into place, was entirely a product of Saucer having taken the exact correct form at the correct moment to pull the block off.
Those opponents, however…
Nathan frowned as he studied them. They partook of the Platonic nature that the rest of the room did. The two Tanya had killed were respectively a man and a woman, one wearing armor made out of thick boiled leather and the other wearing a full suit of plate, neither of which had caused the single strike that slew them to be anything less than perfect and smooth; and Nathan could study the armor and their weapons, a staff and a longsword respectively, but when he looked at the corpses themselves he saw only an abstract representation given narrative form.
“Huh,” he said eloquently, and then glanced over at Honeydew.
The gender ambiguous would-be-ambusher had almost entirely dissolved from the feet up, leaving only the upper half of the concept of a skull and a distinctly punk black, purple, white, and yellow undercut. Recognizing that as the colors of the non-binary flag, he pursed his lips in a mixture of distaste and appreciation for how unsubtly on the nose the representative iconography was.
“So, I don’t see a door,” he said, instead of any of the other things he could have said instead. “What now?”
“Now I shove the whole rest of the platter in my mouth and we fight an army,” Tanya proclaimed gleefully. “Behold! The wages,” she mumbled as five of the remaining ten twists disappeared into her maw, “of being the fastest and best and strongest.”