TODD
The water source they found was an apparent roof collapse. A stream of water fell through the air from a source high above. It weaved its way through iron beams, broken concrete and stone, before wetting the broken floor tiles where it disappeared into a series of cracks. The architecture meant there were no light panels overhead to illuminate the collapse. Grandmother ignited all the overhead panels in the connecting corridors. This was dark space which meant the panels were defaulted to off.
Todd refilled his flask from the flow. Although his flask was enchanted Todd was drinking the water faster than it could refill. He thought about trying to illuminate the area by using Sarah’s new light blade spell on his spear, but decided not to bother. He didn’t think they would linger in the area much longer. Grandmother skinned the spotted cougar and packed its hide into her largest gathering bag. The bag visibly struggled with the non-structure skin. It was one of the stranger things he saw around Grandmother. It made him think the bag was alive and trying hard to please the old woman.
She butchered the animal, only keeping the best cuts. There was more than enough to feed the two of them for the few days they intended to wait.
Todd felt fine. It was weird to think he may have a mortal wound if he left the structure. He didn’t really want to just hole up in a room and stare at the ceiling for a couple days. Todd was starting to think that Grandmother brought the animal carcass along for entertainment, but what was he going to do?
“What do you say we use this time to survey the area closest to the entrance?” Todd proposed. He remembered Grandmother’s earlier mention of wanting to find a gallery near here. Grandmother was washing the blood off her hands in the stream of water. She gave her hands a final rinse before replying.
“That sounds fine. We don’t want to make the mistake of leaving directly after a run again. Since we are going to stay the night anyway, I don’t see how it can hurt.” Grandmother put her pack back on, with her filled gathering bags strapped to the outside. “Let's run the area between here and the entrance first.” She paused for a moment and looked up into the ‘collapse’. “Actually, let's put priority on going up. I don’t remember trying that. There could be ten levels above us or there could be none. If you see a stair, call out. We’ll check it and go up if we can.”
They discovered three floors above the water source. None of them reached as far east as the entrance. On the highest floor, Grandmother came to a halt in front of a wall of glass. Todd thought the glass was opaque at first, with light leaking through from beyond. After they stopped, he could see it was actually transparent but very, very dirty.
Grandmother tapped out a clean spell on the glass. This side of the window became a sparkling image of perfection, but the other side remained clouded. Grandmother leaned forward and peered through the gloom. When she stepped back, Todd took his turn. He could just make out the heavy trunks of a forest through a veil of hanging roots.
“We must be on the next ridge, behind the entrance,” he commented. “It has dense forest on it.” As he thought about it that seemed obvious, considering the direction they traveled. He turned to rest his back against the window. Now that they stopped moving a deep fatigue was making itself known. “I think I am done for the day,” Todd admitted.
“That’s fine,” Grandmother responded. She was considering the space they were in. It was poorly illuminated, as many of the light panels refused to respond. Just within sight the hallway they were following ended in a collapse. Except for the glass windows, which were set back from the main hallway, the outer wall was a little questionable, with huge cracks running down their concrete cores and piles of debris littered around. “I think this might be a rest,” she observed.
With this new concept in mind, Todd reassessed his surroundings. The window setback was actually a wide spot in the hallway. The debris piles of steel, dirt and concrete gravel were the remnants of the furniture that usually appeared in rests. He scraped his foot across the filth on the floor and found the remnant of a tiled floor. The tile under his foot looked like a pentagram, which was not the usual hall tile pattern.
Grandmother flicked a clean spell across the floor. The floor gleamed, even the cement under the missing tiles added a shine to it. Most of the dirt and cement gravel on the floor and debris piles vanished. The debris now looked like the loose piles of Alex’s furniture components. Grandmother continued around the area, tapping out clean spells on each pile of debris and every wall.
The area was starting to transform. The cracks in the wall no longer seeped dirt and were starting to close up. The ceiling remained in the worst shape, although it was cleaner than before, it still showed cracks where light panels were broken or missing.
“Do you see the crystal anywhere?” Grandmother asked.
“No,” Todd admitted. He’d spent all this time, leaning against the glass, just breathing. He forced himself to push off and walk over to the largest pile of debris. This should be the area’s sofa. During their travels south, he noticed that rest crystals were usually near it. They could be embedded in the floor or ceiling, or even just float in the air. They found one inside a sofa once, only discovering it because its immobility caused a hard spot in the cushion.
There wasn’t going to be a problem with it hiding in the sofa this time. Only a set of broken iron tubes remained of the sofa’s frame. Todd picked them up and stacked them to the side. He carefully inspected the section he chose for the stack to ensure he wasn’t covering up the crystal.
He cast a clean spell of his own on the floor revealed when he moved the debris. The tile floor was surprisingly intact underneath. Mixed in with the tiles for zero were the shapes representing one, two and five. Even after a close inspection, he didn’t find the crystal. He sat back up to find that Grandmother had deconstructed the other debris piles.
“I don’t see it,” Todd reported, “but this tile pattern definitely matches a rest.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter. I don’t see any vents or wall breaks large enough for an animal to get in. With the panels that are working we should be safe enough here for the night. We can take turns at the watch,” Grandmother responded. Todd could hear the disappointment in her voice.
“It must be on the ceiling, or floating just below it,” Todd offered. The ceilings in the structure were high. Much higher than in the Speedwell and the ship was constructed with ten to twelve foot ceilings to help counter claustrophobia. Grandmother took her pack off and set it down next to the wall.
“Lift me up,” She said to Todd. Todd took his own pack off. He stored it, with his spear close to Grandmother’s. He took a long drink from his flask before returning to the spot he thought the sofa once was. He knelt down. Grandmother stepped up onto his shoulders and balanced herself with ease. Todd put a hand on one of her feet to help steady her and stood.
He did this many times over the years, usually lifting Ellen or Sarah. Both of the sisters needed far more help from him to keep their balance. Even with his exhausted muscles, he barely felt her weight. She extended a hand high over her head and tapped out a clean spell on the ceiling. Two of the darkened light panels flashed with light as the clean spell passed over them. Seeing this, Grandmother tried again to power them on. One of them came on.
“I see it,” Grandmother said, with the aid of the increased light. “Step twice to the left.” Todd carefully took the two steps. Suddenly Grandmother laughed. “It gave me a two iron discovery bonus.” She announced. She cast one more clean on the ceiling before indicating that he could set her down. It was a very small discovery bonus. If you bashed a rat over the head the payout was three iron coins.
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Todd paused to take a breath after he set Grandmother down. She must have seen him do it because she offered to cook. Todd assured her he was capable and went to get his portable stove out of his pack. Grandmother could cook, but what she produced was barely edible. Plus Todd was interested in the new meat.
The meat turned out to be delicious. It was a lean white meat, with a mild flavor. Todd wished he brought more spices with him to experiment with. He divided up the portion he prepared between Grandmother and himself. She insisted he eat the greater share. She pulled dried fruit and grain bars out of their packs to supplement the meal.
Once his stomach was full, drowsiness hit him full force. He found himself swaying slightly even in a sitting position.
“Get some rest,” Grandmother told him. “I’ll take the first watch.” Todd mumbled his response. He moved over to the glass wall, which grew dark sometime during the meal. He curled up facing the glass. The room grew darker as Grandmother turned off the light directly over them, leaving only the lights farther away on.
He slept.
GRANDMOTHER
She cleaned up the remnants of the meal. The leftover raw meat wouldn’t spoil for several days as long as it was kept in an integrated gathering bag. Todd usually did all this work, but he was too tired to even think of it.
She paced up and down the length of the corridor under a muffle spell so she wouldn’t wake Todd. She thought about fleshing the spotted cougar hide, but didn’t think she could give it the attention the task deserved. She was still incredibly upset with herself for allowing Todd to be injured. Todd always watched her back. She needed to do better at watching his.
She was wandering along behind him thinking about how they made the trip in really good time and that the video recordings in her amulet were almost certain to be viable. The camera only functioned two or three months before the nanobots in the structure would deactivate it. The memory inside would hold the recording a couple months more before the nanobots would get them too. She was counting the days of the trip trying to decide if she would have a recording of the selkie village or not, when she heard the animal growl.
It took her forever to close the gap between them. She batted the animal off of Todd, afraid if she missed and hit him she would do more damage than the beast did.
She sat down in the center of the area as she struggled with her thoughts. They should be perfectly safe here. Since Grandmother reached tier six, the lower tier animals like rats avoided her. This close to the exit there would only be rats. Control sometimes supplied a badger near a training inscription to help a new player learn the spell, but there weren’t any inscriptions nearby. The rest itself would hold back rats, even without Grandmother's presence.
She couldn’t shake her feeling of imminent disaster. She began to fidget with the pile of tubes Todd made out of the debris pile. Her multiple applications of the clean spell left the tubes completely free of rust. Nearly every one ended in a broken jagged end. They looked like they were sandblasted clean. An intact end here and there held the same modular ends as components.
She supposed that made sense. The chairs, sofas and tables in the rests all shared a similar look, which proved they weren’t unique pieces. She was fairly certain that the frames of ruined rests near the first greens were constructed out of steel, not iron. She wondered what the frames of complete furniture found in rests farther in were constructed from. Visible metal pieces turn into wood on several of the sofas she transformed after tier six.
She clicked two of the pieces together as she mused on what would happen if she sat on this pile of debris. Would it suddenly grow a tapestry cover decorated by rats drinking water from a roof collapse waterfall? The image was so clear in her head she felt a shiver run down her spine at the thought that Control might have put it there.
She unhooked the two pieces and set them back down on the pile. They didn’t fit quite the same. Todd placed the longer pieces on the bottom. These two pieces should have been shorter than the ones below them. They weren’t. Maybe it was always that way and she was just not remembering it right. Since these pieces were now out of place from where they found them, they should be disappearing, not getting bigger.
She shifted the pieces around, putting two new pieces on the top. The top pieces were clearly shorter now. She picked them up and held them for a minute or two, feeling a bit like an idiot. She set them back down. They were still shorter. There, she thought to herself, I just didn’t remember it right. Somehow that didn’t satisfy her. Partly because if she stopped thinking about the tubes she would have to start thinking about Todd getting hurt again.
She clicked the first two together and she didn’t do that with the second two. The second two were the same piece and wouldn’t actually lock into each other. One of the original pieces would work. She pulled the first piece out and set in on the left. She rearranged the remaining pile so the short pieces were on top. She took a short piece off the pile and clicked it into place against the left one. She unclicked and set it back on the pile.
It wasn’t longer than the section below it, but it was longer than the other short piece on top. This time she knew she picked up the shortest piece. She picked up the tube and studied it. Was this growth real? She didn’t understand how matter could just appear that fast. She ran her hand down the side of the tube, trying to decide if the tube was actually longer, or if it was just an augmented reality overlay. On her first pass she thought it was an illusion, but when she double checked it was firmed up.
Could the tube wall be getting thinner? she wondered. She set it back down onto the pile. She looked at it laying there and decided it could be stealing material from the rest of the tubes, which would make them get shorter. Didn't someone tell her once that if you left anything in the spot a pile of debris spawned in a rest, the debris returned faster and the item vanished, almost like the new item was converted into the debris?
She wasn’t quite certain what the point of the tubes getting longer would be. She got up and paced for a while. This time she wasn’t thinking about spotted cougars jumping out of the trees. She looked at the other piles of debris. Grandmother moved them off of their original positions to search underneath, but she didn’t stack them. She picked up all the pieces and set them down in a pile directly under the crystal. She couldn’t remember precisely where the other piles were, but she was certain the crystal was over the sofa debris.
She laid the pieces down on top, at a 90 degree rotation so she could keep track of what was in each pile. She sat down and started clicking pieces together and setting them back on the stack to rest. She rotated through each piece of the sofa, and then started again.
Somewhere in the middle of the night she was forced to raid a couple of the closed rooms for more iron component pieces. Her original extra pieces from the chairs didn’t disappear, but they got so short it was hard to balance the longer pieces on top. At some point she realized the sofa pieces were not getting any longer. She studied what she was left with.
Some of the shorter pieces were whole with connectors at each end. The longer sections all ended in jagged ends that looked like puzzle pieces. She matched each one to its other half. When the two sections were perfectly aligned they fused into one.
Close to daybreak she fitted all the finished tubes together into the pattern of a bench with a back and armrests. She sat it under the crystal, with her extra material stacked underneath it and considered. She could go no farther. To turn this into a sofa it needed leather, fabric and stuffing. She could have gotten this same frame by raiding a few rooms just a little bit farther into the structure, without the hours of waiting for the nanobots to transfer material around. In addition the finished product would be a lot more durable. Having started life in a rest, this frame would fall apart in days if not hours if she dragged it out of here. If she left it here, it would convert back to the debris in six days or less.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that this odd hidden functionality was important. Putting the broken bits together into this sofa was like solving a puzzle. Solving puzzles in the structure almost always yielded you something; spells, directions, protection crystals, access. She looked around searching for any changes in the rest. She could not find anything.
She stood up and tried to sit on the frame, but without any strapping to make even a rudimentary seat, it was difficult. She could only perch on the narrow front bar and that was extremely uncomfortable. She gave it up shortly. She stood back and gave the frame one last look. She was hoping maybe her tier six effect on furniture would do something here, but she didn’t think it did. It was looking like the best version of itself. The tubes were smooth and dark. The extra chunks were still sitting underneath. Some of the pieces she brought in from outside were completely gone, while the short stubs from the other debris piles remained.
Did she need to rebuild the other pieces of furniture too? she wondered. That would literally take days. She wondered if she could cheat and just bring in the correct complete pieces from deeper in the structure. What if she upgraded them to steel or copper? Maybe wood was the best upgrade, Grandmother thought as she considered how her tier affected furniture.
Todd mumbled something in his sleep and shifted. Grandmother looked up at the window and could see the first streaks of dawn on the other side of the dirty glass. She really loved this window to the outside. She couldn’t remember having seen one before, just the broken ceiling of a ruined green. Then she remembered the glass doorway to the outside at the new square. It was very similar to this.